Academic trade unions yesterday sent a letter to the Estonian Research Council outlining concrete measures to be implemented with the additional funding in order to maximise the impact on the development of Estonian research.

According to Triin Roosalu, President of the Academic Trade Unions, research starts with researchers and for it to be successful, it must also be reflected in the funding model: "A situation where a researcher's lack of a grant can also leave him or her without a salary is not sustainable, and making research serve the Estonian economy directly and in the short term is not the only goal of research policy."

"The use of extra money for research must lead to an increase in the salaries of researchers compared to the average salary, and the number of researchers must start to rise instead of the current downward trend," Roosalu said, adding that the number of researchers per 1,000 people in the public sector in Estonia today is almost a quarter lower than in Finland, for example.

Another major problem highlighted in the appeal is the continued overly project-driven nature of science, which significantly reduces researchers' sense of security, often prevents them from addressing broader issues and hampers the achievement of long-term goals. The percentage of grant funding (currently only around 101T€T) needs to increase substantially and the project-based share of public funding for researchers needs to be significantly reduced by 2020.

According to the proposals of the research staff, the funding process should be monitored by the Research Council, the achievement of the funding targets should be monitored in parallel, and the trade unions, the Estonian Research Council and the Estonian Academy of Young Scientists as representative organisations of academic staff should be involved in the monitoring.

Find the full text of the petition from here.