The OSCARS consortium decided for a complementary second call with a residual budget of only 3 millions €. Three times more applications than in the main call were submitted - 746 in comparison to 264 - asking for in total 173 millions €. This clearly shows a strong interest in the actions of the OSCARS project.
The evaluation process of the 2nd OSCARS Open Call for Open Science Projects and Services concluded on October 10th, resulting in a total of 12 projects being selected for funding from 710 eligible and in-scope applications received in what turned out to be an extremely competitive call.
The funded projects of the 2nd Open Call will be publicly announced as soon as the project coordinators have signed an agreement to take up the funding.
Quite some projects were not selected for funding despite the excellent evaluation that placed them among the best. Due to the limited amount of funding available, only a small fraction of them were in the end selected based on the recommendations from external experts.
Some figures from the 2nd OSCARS Open Call
Proposals were received from 67 countries, with 25% of coordinating organisations from outside the European Union.
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), nine of the selected projects are related to one of the Science Clusters. Two are categorised as cross-cluster, and one, project is from an area not included in the domains represented in the OSCARS consortium. These projects, together with those funded via the 1st OSCARS Open Call - all together 70 projects - cover the widest possible range of types of activities and diversity of subjects.
The 31 organisations involved in the projects selected for funding are spread out across 11 countries. The majority, 27 organisations, come from academia or research (18 Universities, 5 Research & Technology Organisation and 4 Research Infrastructures), the rest being SMEs (3), and other types of organisations (1). All projects have opted for the full 24 months duration. The majority of proposals (11) have requested a contribution of more than € 200,000. Only one project has 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 after the closing of the call on 14 May. Procedures were set up to ensure there were no conflicts of interest.
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, produced a ranking list based on the results from the independent evaluation process. Following this, the final selection of projects to be funded was agreed on and confirmed by the members of the Science Clusters Board (SCB).
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 November/beginning of December 2025.
More about OSCARS Open Calls
The two OSCARS Open Calls aimed to source open science projects and services, 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 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.
A high diversity of stakeholders and the high number of in total one thousand applications across the two calls, demonstrates the high relevance of the OSCARS programme and the success of the cascading grant funding scheme with this specific size and duration - put in place by the European Commission - that clearly responds to the expectations of the scientific communities in terms of supporting data intensive research, Open Science and FAIR data.
This highlights the need for more of these very targeted, small-medium size grants that are light on administrative overhead, that further Open Science and enable scientists to contribute their scientific content to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
All funded projects are available and browsable here.
We are expecting to publish some first information about the projects funded via the 2nd Open Call in the “Projects” section of our website in the coming weeks. To keep up to date, subscribe now to the OSCARS community newsletter!