The European Commission uses external, independent experts in the evaluation of applications and reviews of current projects.
Registration
If you want to work for the European Commission as an expert evaluator of applications for Horizon Europe, you will need to register and indicate your areas of expertise on the European Commission’s Funding & Tenders portal:
If you have been an expert evaluator in Horizon 2020, you need to re-register if you wish to become an expert evaluator in Horizon Europe.
Professorships for the European Research Area
The European Research Council (ERC) appoints its expert evaluators based on scientific merits. For this reason, it is not possible to register as an expert evaluator for ERC. Evaluators for ERC are appointed and invited by the ERC Scientific Council.
Selection and Remuneration
The expert evaluators are selected from the European Commission’s expert evaluator database. Their qualifications must match the research and innovation disciplines to be evaluated. A Horizon Europe expert evaluator is external and only represents his or her own expertise.
The European Commission also uses experts that can assess the ethical aspects of a Horizon Europe application. Registration is done in a similar manner.
Evaluators are paid by the European Commission in relation to the number of days worked.
Benefits from evaluator work
Evaluators have much benefit from this job, both in professional terms and with regard to networking. They learn a lot about how EU applications are evaluated. For expert evaluators wishing to apply themselves experience from being an evaluator is a great help in their own application efforts.
This appears from the 2018 report from the Agency for Higher Education and Science ”Evaluations and Evaluators in Horizon2020” prepared in cooperation with the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University.
The report shows how expert evaluators experienced the evaluation processes and clarifies which questions are most important in an application for funding from the EU.
The report is based on 100 questionnaire responses and 27 interviews with Danish Horizon2020 expert evaluators.