Health crisis: Doctoral and Postdoctoral Contracted are extended

To limit the impacts of the crisis, Frédérique Vidal, French minister for Higher Education, Research and Innovation, has decided to approve the extension of doctoral contracts and other categories of fixed-terms contracts because due to Covid-19 and health emergency reason.

Prerequisites and processes

The ministry reminds the process of an application for a doctoral contract extension:

- the extension must be approved by the president or director of the institution, in the within the limit of one year, by concluding an amendment to the contract, justified by a motivated request presented by the interested party;

- the request is made on the proposal of the director of the doctoral school, after the opinion of the thesis director and the director of the research unit or team;

- the validation of these new extended contracts is pronounced by the Ministry on the proposal of the institutions.

Extension and funding

To date, with over 7,000 requests for extension of doctoral contracts, and Temporary Lecturer and Research Assistant contracts, post-doctoral fellows and other fixed-term contracts, more than 10,000 requests for extension will be approved by the Ministry for the 2020-2023 period.

The Ministry stresses that it has “fully compensated the cost to the operators of these extended contracts” for a total amount of 30 million euros in 2020. And it is on the same financial mechanism that the requests for extensions for 2021 will be fully compensated at the end of the year. All of these measures will lead to raise about 90 million euros used as funding over the period 2020-2023.

Enhancement and promotion of the doctorate

As the Ministry emphasises, this decision is part of “the Minister’s desire to boost the value of the doctorate”. This desire is reflected in the new Research Programming Law, which created a private law doctoral contract, providing for a 20% increase in doctoral contracts and a gradual increase in the remuneration of new doctoral contracts by 30% between 2021 and 2023.

This is the spirit in which Campus France promotes doctoral training and, more generally, French research internationally. This promotion takes the form of several initiatives and missions, such as:

• providing information to foreign students and researchers about research in France, in particular by organising “French doctoral promotion tours around the world”;
• managing research programmes (such as the Hubert Curien partnerships, the MOPGA programme, etc.);
• providing advice and support for researchers, research organisations and companies hosting foreign doctoral students