Academic scientists in Germany increasingly rely on project-based grant money for their research — but experts warn that grant success is no guarantee of long-term career security.

In 2009, German research universities attracted €5.3 billion (US$6.7 billion) in grant money from national and European funding sources — more than twice what they attraced in 1998. The share of external grant money in overall funding of university research increased from 16% to 23% between 1998 and 2009.

The figures, along with a wealth of regional information and recent funding trends, are included in the funding atlas released today by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany’s main granting agency.

In 2009, around 170,000 university-based scientists eligible for external grants for individual or collaborative projects received an average €30,000 in project money — all funding sources counted. The some 22,000 full professors at German universities received on average €232,000 during that year.

Average grants in 2009 were largest in mechanical engineering (professors: €764,000; other scientists: €60,000), physics (€326,000; €40,000) and in geosciences (€257,000; €40,000). In the humanities, researchers made do with an average of €64,000 and €15,600, respectively.

But there is a problem, says Dieter Lenzen, vice-president of the German Rector’s Conference. The amount of institutional funding German public universities receive from the state has not kept pace with the sharp rise in grant-funded research. Between 1998 and 2009, overall government expenditure for universities increased by just 23% — from €12.6 to €15.5 billion — according to the report.

And since some external grants don’t include overhead costs, scientists’ success in attracting project money often causes headaches for their host institutions.

“Universities can hardly offer reliable career paths to young scientists trained on grant-funded projects,” he says.

Graph:  Institutional funding (dark blue) versus project funding (light blue) of German university research 1998–2009 (€ billions )