When you apply for a grant or act as an independent expert in the evaluation process, your personal data is processed by the European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA) and the European Commission.
This page summarises how we handle your data and outlines your rights under Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, the data protection law applicable to EU institutions.
The ERC processes applicants’ and participants’ personal data to manage proposal submission, evaluate scientific merit via experts, and ensure legally compliant grant awarding.
The ERC processes experts’ personal data to identify, appoint, and manage independent experts, enabling them to evaluate proposals and support programme implementation and impact assessment.
Who is affected?
- Applicants: Principal Investigators submitting proposals and the team members.
- Experts: Peer reviewers and evaluation panel members who assess the proposals.
Objective of the processing operation
The processing operation aims to enable and manage the submission and evaluation of research proposals for ERC grants by running a legally compliant and effective evaluation process.
The identification, appointment and management of independent experts is fundamental for the running of the evaluation process and the programme support activities.
Data Retention Periods
The ERC maintains records of proposals and evaluations to ensure transparency, accountability, and the long-term study of scientific progress.
In addition to the operational retention period (detailed information in the records), your data are further processed for archiving purposes in the public interest, historical, statistical or scientific purposes as follows:
- Research and Statistical Purposes: Personal data is retained for 25 years. This allows the ERC to conduct longitudinal studies, track the career impact of ERC funding, and analyse the effectiveness of the European Research Area.
- Historical Purposes: Beyond the 25-year period, files are transferred to the ERC Archive and kept indefinitely for historical archiving purposes to document the history of European scientific excellence.
To clarify why the ERCEA retains your data for these extended periods, it is helpful to understand the scientific and administrative necessity behind the 25-year and indefinite timelines.
1. The Need for a 25-Year Retention Period
While standard administrative data is often deleted after 5–10 years, the ERCEA has a mandate to monitor the long-term impact of its funding. The EDPS confirmed that a 25-year period is necessary for Scientific Research and Statistical Purposes for several reasons:
- Longitudinal Career Tracking: The ERC needs to analyse the career trajectories of researchers (both successful and unsuccessful) over decades. This helps determine if ERC grants are achieving their goal of fostering "scientific excellence" and how a grant—or a rejection—affects a researcher's long-term output.
- Impact Assessment of the EU Framework Programme: To justify public spending, the European Commission must perform "ex-post" evaluations. Since breakthroughs in fundamental research often take 15–20 years to result in tangible societal or economic impact, the data must be preserved long enough to link early-stage proposals to late-stage outcomes.
- Statistical Validity: For the data to be statistically significant for "Science of Science" studies, the dataset must remain intact for a generation of researchers, ensuring that trends in European research (e.g., gender balance, geographic distribution, or emerging disciplines) can be accurately mapped.
2. The Need for Indefinite Retention (Permanent Preservation)
Once the 25-year active period expires, files are not simply destroyed. They are transferred to the ERC Archive. This is justified by:
- Public Interest and Heritage: The ERC funds "frontier research." The proposals and the expert evaluations of those proposals represent a unique record of the "state of the art" of human knowledge at a specific point in time.
- Historical Research: Future historians will use these records to study the evolution of scientific thought and the history of European integration through scientific cooperation.
- Transparency and Accountability: Indefinite archiving ensures that the decision-making process of the EU institutions remains transparent for future generations, serving as a permanent administrative record of how public funds were allocated.
3. Safeguards During These Periods
Because these periods are exceptionally long, the ERCEA has established strict safeguards to protect your privacy:
- Access Control: During the 25-year period, data is stored in a restricted, isolated folder on the ERCEA servers. Access is granted only on a "need-to-know" basis to authorised staff for specific statistical and research purposes.
- Pseudonymisation: Where the purpose of the processing of the personal data can be achieved without identifying the individuals, the ERCEA will implement a pseudonymise data system to effectively separating the "person" from the "scientific data."
- Data Minimisation: Only the data strictly necessary for these historical and research purposes (such as the proposal content, PI name, and evaluation scores) is kept for the full duration, while purely administrative documents (like travel reimbursement receipts) are deleted much sooner.