ABIC is promoting a public petition addressed to the FCT demanding the immediate opening of 2013 PhD and Pos-Doc applications.
The undersigned below can be found here:
“Science is inseparable from a populations’ economic and social development, contributing to job creation, as well as to improving the welfare of the population in general. In the Portuguese case, National Science policies have been built on the precarious condition of scientific researchers and research grants. This reality has led thousands of grant holders to search for work outside Portugal or even abandon Science for lack of stable employment standards.
In a situation where grant holders have to manage their lives in uncertainty, the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) has decided to conduct an unprecedented cut in the financing of research in Portugal. As such, in addition to the radical reductions for the Research Projects (over 75%), FCT will cut more than 50% of the PhD grants attributed in the national call for applications while the severity of Post-Doc grants cuts are still unknown.
Up until 2012, the FCT national call for applications for the PhD and Post-Doc grants had always occurred in the month of June, coinciding with most national and international University applications period. The delay in launching the new call for applications threatens the deadlines for the beginning of the grants with eventual consequences for the continuity of the research projects, fee payments, etc.
The time has come to say, Enough! This FCT board does not have any valid reasons to delay the opening of the call for grants applications. The focus of this institution should be the dignified treatment of researchers. If it is unable to do so then it is not complying with its mission. FCT cannot continue to be a branch of the Finance Ministry and “economicism” cannot continue to be its only guiding line.
Therefore the undersigned citizens below demand:
- 1.The immediate opening of the FCT’s national call for applications for PhD and Post-Doc grants;
- 2.That the number of available individual grants is maintained or increased;
- 3.The non-inclusion, in the new call for applications regulation, of exclusion/eliminating rules that may/will? artificially reduce the number of candidates, when compared with previous years.
- 4.Grant holders’ right to a work contract and to a more dignified and stable life.”