Immediate Plans of the New Fund Director

In a brief interview for the newspaper Capital, the new director of the National Science Fund - Prof. Ovtscharoff, talks about his priorities in the near future. Prof. Ovtscharoff commented that his first measures will be to initiate a new set of regulations to govern the work of the fund and to select new committees to re-examine the project from the most recent call for proposals. All projects which did not receive financing will be re-examined, including those which were disqualified for administrative reasons.

This re-examination comes about after a long and arduous exchange between Bulgarian scientists, the former Fund leadership and the former Minister of Education which lead to the firing/resignation of both the Fund president and the minister. The results from the 2012 call for proposals were announced on November 13th and immediately stirred anger among the scientific circles in Bulgaria. And while it is true that one should not judge a book by its cover and a project by its title, the fact that many of the recipients were private companies with no capacity for research and close collaborators/proteges of the Fund's leadership rose suspicion which boiled into a series of protests during the last three months. Disregarding the demonstrations and claiming innocence, the former Fund leadership was quick to distribute the grants to their recipients in early December.

Three weeks ago, a report requested by the parliamentary committee on science and education uncovered a list of over 60 irregularities in the evaluation of the proposals from last year's call. The findings of the committee ranged from missing signatures and dates on financial documentation, to utter disregard for the hiring requirements, to "opportunities for subjectivity in the distribution of government money" (i.e., conflicts of interest abound). As many as half of all submitted proposals were disqualified for (frequently bogus) administrative reasons. While the committee did not have the expertise to determine if the peer review procedure was flawed, the upcoming review hopefully will.

The National Science Fund is the only organization in the Bulgarian government to provide research grants for all areas of the sciences and humanities. Its budget has shrunk dramatically (by a factor of 5) over the last few years making such grants extremely competitive and increasing the scrutiny of the Fund's work. The 2012 budget of the Fund amounted to a meager 14 million lev ($9.4 million). The alternative EU grant funds do not cover as wide of a topic range and are even more competitive. Bulgarian science institutions have struggled financially over the last two decades as money for science and education has slowly evaporated under changing government priorities and, more recently, austerity measures. Both university faculty and research scientists have witnessed shrinking resources to the point where there is hardly funding for anything besides salaries, even though academic salaries in Bulgaria are a factor of at least 10 lower than in western Europe. It is therefore unsurprising that many Bulgarian scientists have migrated to foreign institutions.

In other news, after parliamentary parties refused to select a new Prime Minister, president Plevenliev has announced that he will start talks to organize an interim cabinet. "The cabinet is leaving, but the problems remain" he stated during his speech, voicing disappointment and surprise over the sudden resignation of Boiko Borisov.