European Science Foundation: Eurocores
The European science system must remain competitive with that of the other major economic blocks. The EU Framework Programme is mission-orientated and does not cover all areas of science. The challenge is to complement it with an effective and efficient mechanism for multinational collaboration within Europe in basic research to overcome some of the disadvantages of scale in a distributed science policy system. Such a mechanism should maximise the investments made at national level.
The EUROCORES scheme has been developed in order to address this challenge. The aim is to have a system complementary to the Framework Programme by bringing together national funding agencies, national research organisations and their analogues.
The EUROCORES programme is theme-based. Every year, the ESF invites the scientific community to submit new and challenging theme proposals.
Next, Collaborative Research Project (CRP) proposals are invited and assessed through international peer review.
Annually, between 10 and 20 CRP’s are funded by ESF and other participating funding organisations, with a total programme budget of 5-12 million euros. As such, the scheme provides a flexible framework which allows national basic research funding organisations to support top-class European research in and across all research areas.
How does it work?
Any research team in Europe can submit proposals in response to the EUROCORES theme proposal call.
Programme Proposals are made in response to a EUROCORES programme call and submitted by a Project Leader. A CRP has to be made up by a group of Principal Investigators from collaborating institutions/laboratories from at least three countries in which there are EUROCORES Funding Agencies (EFA’s). Participants from countries without an EFA or from non-ESF European countries can participate on a self-financing basis. When a programme has been accepted, funding agencies formally commit themselves to participate.
What does the funding cover?
Depending on the project, EUROCORES funding may include researchers’ salaries, equipment, and support for publications, infrastructure, travel expenses and conference participation.