The 1st OSCARS Open Call for Open Science Projects and Services concluded in July resulting in a total of 58 projects being selected for funding.
The project coordinators will have to sign an agreement to take up the funding. Only then will the 1st Open Call’s funded projects be publicly announced.
Coming from the five domains of the OSCARS consortium (astronomy and particle physics, environmental sciences, life sciences, photon and neutron science, and social sciences and humanities), 38 projects were selected for funding. Meanwhile, 17 projects were categorised as cross-domain, involving or targeting stakeholders from multiple fields. Additionally, three projects have been selected for funding from areas not included in the domains represented in the OSCARS consortium. They all together cover the widest possible range of types of activities and diversity of subjects.
The coordinators of the projects selected for funding are spread out across 19 countries. As expected, the majority, 50 organisations, come from academia or research, the rest being SMEs (3), one large company and other types of organisations (4). 48 projects have opted for the full 24 months duration. The majority of proposals (52 projects) have requested a contribution of more than € 200,000. Only eight projects have asked for less.
Selection process
An Independent Evaluation Committee (IEC) composed of top scientists, FAIR data science experts, and representatives of the European research communities evaluated the submitted proposals from the closing of the call on 15 May. Procedures were set up to ensure there were no conflicts of interest. The IEC, supported by the OSCARS Grants Management Team, produced a ranking list and funding recommendations.
Both the ranking list and funding recommendations were forwarded to the OSCARS Project Management Board (PMB), which verified and confirmed that the evaluation process was carried out transparently and in accordance with European Commission rules. Following this, the final selection of projects to be funded was agreed on and confirmed by the members of the Science Clusters Board.
Funding will be provided to selected projects upon successful conclusion of a Third-Party Project Agreement signed by the coordinating organisation of the selected projects. We are expecting that this process will be concluded at around the end of August/beginning of September.
Highly-competitive open call
With 264 submitted proposals, the success rate is at 22% for this 1st Open Call. Proposals were received from 33 countries, of which 30% from outside the European Union, between 15 March and 15 May 2024 following a launch at a public event in Thessaloniki. A total of €13 million in funding was made available in this first call.
Proposals were coordinated from 226 organisations spanning universities (37%), research technology organisations (27%), Research Infrastructures (14%), SMEs and startups (7%), non-profit or NGOs (6%), international organisations (3%) and others (6%).
The 1st Open Call aimed to source open science projects, i.e., scientific research projects, citizen science projects, or proposals to develop services or networks in the scientific disciplines covered by and beyond the Science Clusters. These projects should aim to make (meta)data, software, tools and/or workflows FAIR and available to fellow researchers and the general public, to facilitate accessibility and reuse by the scientific community at large.
Do you want to be informed about the funded projects of the 1st Open Call? We are expecting to publish some first information about the projects on our website in the coming weeks followed by a webinar to showcase them in more detail. To keep up to date and get an invitation to the webinar, join the OSCARS community newsletter now!