Taking the variety of disciplines into account

The 2021-2030 research planning act will have a significant impact on ANR. Has the past year helped you move towards this evolution?

The act brings the budgets for French research back to growth and offers prospects for strengthening its position on the international stage. It consolidates ANR's missions within the research and innovation ecosystem and strengthens its resources for intervention so that it can better respond to the needs of laboratories and institutions: increasing success rates, increasing Préciput funding and adapting the means of support to the needs of different scientific disciplines.
In line with its primary mission, ANR will continue to allocate a substantial proportion of its funding via an "investigator-driven" approach, i.e. through non-targeted calls for proposals. This is where scientific and technological breakthroughs and original solutions often emerge. The Agency will take the varied needs of disciplines and projects into account in terms of both resources and duration. Support for young researchers is a priority. We support over 300 of them every year across all disciplines and all sites.
Research is needed in many fi elds, and ANR has a detailed knowledge of research and its evolution through the almost 19,000 projects it has fi nanced since it was founded. The Agency helps to expand the contribution of research to the public policy put forward by central and local governments. In 2019, we signed a strategic partnership with the Normandy region to coordinate and simplify our dealings with laboratories and companies in the area.
2019 was also a year of recognition. It was marked by the Agency's evaluation by HCERES (the French High Council for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education), which involved interviews with over a hundred people, both internally and externally, including representatives of our various stakeholders, on issues such as the Work Programme and Investments for the Future. The HCERES committee, made up of French and foreign fi gures chaired by Rémi Quirion, Quebec's chief scientist and chairman of the Quebec Research Funds, commended the planning and evaluation processes and ANR's recognition by its French and international partners. This is thanks to the work of everyone at the Agency and all the scientists who are members of its evaluation panels, whom I would like to salute and to thank once again.
We have approached 2020 confi dently but clearsightedly. The Covid-19 crisis has reminded us all of the importance of research and the expectations it generates in society. The questions of scientific integrity and of the relations between science and society have taken on a more fundamental dimension than ever. ANR will continue in its commitments to scientific integrity, open science, gender equality and the spread of scientific culture. This is the basis of our next Contract of Objectives and Performance.

ANR helps to expand
the contribution of research
to public policy

The publication of the 2019 annual report coincides with the Covid-19 crisis. How have you responded?

The crisis has been a challenge for us, and for the whole ecosystem of higher education, research and innovation more generally. In early March, we put together an action plan to ensure our work could continue (see box). Thanks to the commitment and professionalism of our teams, ANR has been able to respond to urgent research needs during the lockdown.
We launched an initial Covid-19 Flash call to provide an immediate response, with the fi rst projects beginning at the end of March, and a second Covid-19 Research-Action call, open until October 2020, to take into account the full diversity and evolution of the questions that have emerged as the epidemic has developed. Keeping this call open, with submissions evaluated continuously, is a new approach that has provided a great deal of information.
The scientific committee and the Agency's teams have shown great commitment and exceptional ability to adapt. The urgency of the situation has led to great efforts in peer review and the quick delivery of funding, and has led to new partnerships involving other players that support research in our calls (several regions, the French Foundation for Medical Research and Fondation de France).
International collaborations on Covid-19 have also been developed with ANR's partner agencies. More than ever, we need research, and particularly humanities and social science research, to better understand the world in which we live and how it is evolving. The Agency's 2021 Work Programme, published in July 2020, gives priority to Covid-19 in order to take the long time scales of research into account and continue support for projects fi ghting the pandemic.

What are the Agency's other priority areas of work?

We must continue to work on simplifying and modernising our activities to streamline the process for researchers and institutions and make our actions more legible for both funding recipients and our fellow citizens. As part of the deployment of France's National Open Science Plan, we have set up a discussion and coordination network with INCa, Ademe, Anses and Inserm/ANRS to define a joint approach to supporting open science. We hope to continue this cooperation in order to reinforce the visibility of our respective calls for proposals and simplify and harmonise our procedures in relation to laboratories.

More than ever, we need research to better understand the world in which we live and how it is evolving