A similar thing happened with the draft work programmes for Horizon 2020, before its official launch in 2014. Then a quick Google search served up several “confidential” documents, providing crucial information for those interested in applying for the first calls under the €70 billion programme.
That led to criticisms – denied by the Commission - that a select group of institutes and universities had been given a preview of the crucial documents, well ahead of the first round of calls.
The publication of draft work programmes has been a long-simmering issue in the Commission’s framework R&D programmes. The documents are written by Commission staffers in several drafts over a few years, and the later drafts are shared with the Programme Committees – the legally constituted groups of EU member state representatives who have a say in how the work programmes end up. That means there are hundreds of officials across the EU have access to the documents. Inevitably, they leak