The European Commission has recently announced the results of the 2025 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks (DN) call where €617,18 million will be dedicated to fund 141 doctoral programmes that will train 2115 doctoral candidates in and outside academia.
With this announcement, we would like to remind UK beneficiaries that participation in the MSCA programme requires adherence to its rules and principles, including the proper implementation of the Grant Agreement obligations.
Under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, recruitment must follow an open, transparent, merit-based, impartial and equitable process as laid down in Annex 5 of the Model Grant Agreement and the European Charter for Researchers.
We understand that the issue of tuition fees is a reoccurring issue for MSCA Doctoral Networks in the UK as these can be quite high for international students. Institutions can decide what rate to charge doctoral candidates recruited as part of a MSCA DN, and we would like to share some of the approaches we’ve seen in the past:
- complete waiving of fees for all recruited researchers under the action
- charging every recruited researcher a reduced rate, which is neither the home rate nor the international student rate
- charging every recruited researcher the home rate
It is also worth noting that MSCA doctoral candidates are recruited as staff members, so if institutions normally offer their staff a reduced or waived fee this must also be offered to recruited researchers on MSCA DN.
We would like to emphasise that the importance of following an open, transparent, merit-based, impartial and equitable recruitment procedure, and how not doing so, would constitute a breach of the GA obligations to recruit the researchers on MSCA DN.