Our EURECIA academic research project comes at an exciting time for the organisation of European science.

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The European research funding landscape has been changing in far-reaching ways, including the launch of the European Research Council (ERC) in 2007. The ERC is a potentially transformative force for science at European and national levels.

EURECIA is an academic project running from February 2009 to April 2012. We have developed and applied a novel conceptual framework and methodology to help us better understand the dynamics of the European research system and the ERC’s activities. This prepares the ground for future assessments of the impact of research policy schemes by tackling various long-standing challenges about how to properly register and attribute change to specific policy influences, in this case the ERC and its two initial funding schemes (the ERC Starting Grants and Advanced Grants, formerly known as the Starting Independent Researcher Grant and the Advanced Investigators Grant schemes).

We have explored intended and unintended impacts from the point of view of researchers, research communities, research organisations, research funders, and on the governance of science.