The European Commission has awarded Seal of Excellence certificates to applicants for MSCA Individual Fellowships in 2020.
With a record 11,300-plus proposals received for the 2020 Individual Fellowships call, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions are highly competitive. Of this number, 1,630 were funded.
High quality applications
The MSCA Seal of Excellence (SoE) is a quality label awarded to applicants for MSCA Individual Fellowships (IF) who achieved a high score in their applications but ultimately did not get funding because of budget constraints.
Thanks to SoE, other funding bodies are in a position to leverage the Horizon 2020 evaluation process if they wish. A proposal which has earned the MSCA SoE may be supported by national, regional and university-level schemes.
Germany and the Netherlands recently set up support schemes for SoE recipients, bringing to 12 the total number of countries with such schemes.