Excluding the ERC Synergy grant, ERC grants are personal. This means that the ERC AdG, CoG and StG projects cannot be collaborative efforts. Since many applicants are used to working in collaboration with their peers and colleagues – this comes as a contrast and strikes as counter-intuitive. In many other grants, collaborations are common and even encouraged. In ERC, excluding the PI’s direct team members, collaborators are normally not welcome to the research effort. The previous sentence is not unequivocal. Working with many ERC applicants en