By law, NWO's task is to improve the quality of research and to stimulate new research. Yet there is no evidence that it improves research quality, and researchers start new lines of research perfectly well on their own. What they get instead is funding that is slow, bureaucratic and arbitrary, and ‘coordination’ that mostly gets in the way. We want a smaller NWO that supports researchers and safeguards public money — and leaves decisions about research to researchers and their institutions.
What goes wrong in today's funding system — and what a good system does instead.
From first submission to final decision, an NWO application takes well over a year, as exemplified by the NWO career grants. Meanwhile research does not stand still: competitors publish, collaborations shift and ideas lose their edge. An applicant who is then rejected is worse off than before applying.
We ask for a system that decides on every application within three months of submission. Research moves fast worldwide, and researchers in the Netherlands cannot afford to wait a year for an answer.
Everything in the NWO system is documented, regulated, defined and constrained: call texts, grant rules, codes of conduct, templates, declarations and agreements to accept. Much of it exists to protect NWO from legal challenges, not to help research. For researchers, the system has become a barrier rather than a support.
We ask for a system that keeps bureaucracy away from researchers. NWO's performance should be measured, among other things, by how little effort it takes to submit a proposal.
Nobody can tell in advance whether research will have impact. Studies show that reviewers assessing the same proposals consistently disagree. Yet proposals are ranked by generalist committees outside the applicant's field, against criteria such as expected impact and knowledge utilisation that cannot honestly be judged before the work is done.
We ask for allocation methods that don't pretend to predict impact, with decisions made by researchers in the field: scientific peers, colleagues in the same discipline and department, and applicants assessing each other's proposals.
There is no long-term perspective. A rejected proposal usually has to be rewritten from scratch for a different grant format, and earlier reviews count for nothing. Researchers rewrite the same ideas year after year.
We ask for a system with memory: one living proposal and CV that move with the researcher across funding schemes, with earlier reviews carried forward and taken into account.
NWO calls itself transparent, but that applies to procedures and statistics only. The documents behind the decision on your own proposal are hard to obtain. Objection and appeal procedures exist, but they are heavily regulated and come with warnings against lengthy procedures that deter researchers from using them.
We ask for transparency by default: with every decision, applicants automatically receive all documents about their own application — reviews, scores, panel reports and their ranking — together with the anonymised score distribution of the round, the panel composition, and the summaries and scores of funded proposals. As much open data as possible, without harming privacy or research ideas.
In 2025 NWO received 9,613 applications. Most were rejected — 83 percent in the Talent Programme (Veni, Vidi, Vici). Every application costs weeks of research time, plus the work of grant advisers that universities and institutes employ just to navigate the system. On top of that, NWO spent €85 million on its own management costs in 2025, up from €78 million in 2024.
We ask for a system that keeps the hidden cost of applying to a minimum, and for lower management costs at NWO, so that as much money as possible reaches research. A system with memory and lighter procedures prevents wasted applications at the source.
Complaints about NWO are filed with NWO. Under its 2025 complaints regulation, an NWO employee handles them, and complaints about board members are handled by the Executive Board itself. The procedure has no external members and no independent review. Complaints about decisions that can be formally objected to, such as a rejection, aren't handled at all, and on objections NWO also takes the final decision. Only afterwards can a researcher turn to the National Ombudsman, who doesn't review the scientific assessment itself and whose findings aren't binding.
We ask for an independent ombudsperson for research funding, appointed from outside NWO and including active researchers. It should have access to all assessment documents, review both complaints and procedural errors in assessments, and issue binding findings (or NWO must explain publicly why it departs from them). It should publish all cases and outcomes every year.
Beneath all these problems lies one cause: decisions about research are taken too far from research, by an organisation that increasingly determines what is researched, how, and by whom.
We ask that decisions about research are taken as close to the research as possible: by researchers and their institutions. NWO becomes a smaller organisation that supports grant holders and oversees the proper spending of public money.
Confidential and without names. Together we build an evidence base for policymakers.
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