The President of DTU announced in April an internal funding round at DTU with 134 million DKK for internal collaborative projects between two or more DTU departments. While more funds for research is only a good thing, the way the funds will be allocated at DTU appears to have been done without a deeper consideration of the time investment involved on the part of the researchers applying for the funds.

With this post I would like to highlight the enormous time wasted on the side of the professors and associate professors with regards to the RSO call. Let’s dive into the numbers. In total, 134 million DKK will be handed out with each project having to be between 1-5 million DKK. Assuming that most application are probably at the higher end of this spectrum, I take the average funds applied for to be 4 million DKK. This means that 34 projects will be funded. So how many projects applications has been sent? I have asked the office in charge of the process for the specific numbers, but they have not gotten back to me yet. However, I know that my department (DTU Energy) sent in 10 applications and DTU Electro sent in 31 applications, so let us take the average number of applications per department to be 20. At DTU there are 20 departments and centers, making the total number of applications 400.

This makes the success rate on the RSO funds a meagre 8.5% - a low number even compared to open public research calls. But an even worse fact is the time spent on writing these unsuccessful RSO applications. With the numbers above a total of 366 RSO applications are not funded. Let’s assume that 2.5 people are involved in each application - i.e. that 2-3 departments are collaborating on each application. Next let’s assume that each person involved in a proposal spent two days writing and working on the proposal - this seems reasonable considering that meetings often had to be held, text written and economy budgeted. These numbers combined means that 1 work week was spent on each RSO application, or a grand total of 366 work weeks on the unsuccessful applications. This amount to 9 man-years of work, only on wasted RSO applications. Given an hourly rate of 600 kr, this amount to 8.1 MDKK!

To summarize:

• 134 million is to be awarded in projects of size 1-5 million DKK.
• Taking an average project to be 4 million DKK leads to 34 funded projects.
• Assuming 20 applications per department, a total of 366 applications are not funded.
• With a week of work per application, a total of 9 man-years are wasted on unsuccessful applications.

In short, simply due to the RSO application round, we have 9 professors/associate professors employed at DTU, whose only job in 2026 it is to write RSO applications that are not granted. In no other public institutions than universities would such a waste of time and money be accepted. And the above numbers do not consider the people reviewing the submitted applications, where the workload must also be substantial. When next time additional funds for research are granted, I suggest to strongly limit/prioritize whom can send in proposals or even better: simply give the money to the departments (or even directly to the researchers) as base funding to continue the existing research.

Rasmus Bjørk
Professor, Ph.D.
DTU Energy