CoARA Boost Cascade Funding Programme (Second Round)

It will fund projects facilitating knowledge-exchange, piloting new initiatives within institutions, and enabling lasting institutional change.

CoARA, offers a platform for collaboration and mutual learning. It also encourages and supports research organisations to investigate and test what will efficiently work ‘in real life’.

Aim

• The call aims to:
  • Facilitate the exchange, transfer and adaptation of proven good practices and their adoption in research organisations.
  • Catalyse the set-up or transformation of research assessment practices and tools in line with the commitments of the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment.
  • Support the development and testing of new and innovative research assessment approaches, models and procedures.

Funding Information

• The total budget for the call is up to €2.33M, up to €1.22M are released in the second round.
• Proposals may be funded up to €30,000 – 60,000 each (including indirect costs).
• Teaming projects:
  • Maximum grant amount: €40K (in total for all the organisations taking part in the teaming project)
  • Maximum project duration: 1 year
• Institutional pilot projects:
  • Maximum grant amount: €30K
  • Maximum project duration: 1 year
• Institutional change projects:
  • Maximum grant amount: €60K
  • Maximum project duration: 1 year

Eligible Projects

• Teaming projects: Organisations are encouraged to share practices and experiences to foster mutual learning and ensure continuous mutual improvement, while respecting organisations’ autonomy. Examples of activities:
  • Projects could involve transferring or benefitting from existing knowledge, testing the feasibility of adapting and implementing solutions that work in another institutional context, enhancing capacity-building or enhancing open infrastructural components of responsible research assessment.
• Institutional pilot projects: Institutional pilot projects offer an opportunity for institutions to experiment with and evaluate new assessment approaches, procedures, frameworks, and tools in the context of a clearly defined initiative (such as a pilot competitive call in a university or the development of a concept). Examples of activities:
  • As institutional pilot projects should respond to specific needs within the organisation, the types of funded activities will vary from one project to another. As an example, they could involve the following: development and deployment of (ITbased) workflows, adoption of qualitative KPIs, adoption of open infrastructure, bringing more diversity to the assessment of research outputs and academic activities.
• Institutional change projects: Institutional change projects provide the means to accelerate change in procedures and process in an organisation. Examples of activities:
  • While institutional pilot projects are designed to explore the feasibility and test innovations associated with the reform of research assessment within an organisation, institutional change calls are instruments to sustainably integrate such changes in the applicant organisation’s institutional policies and practices and thus to make a lasting change.

Eligibility Criteria

• The primary targets of the CoARA Boost Cascade Funding Programme are legal entities of the following types:
  • Academies, learned societies that implement some form of research assessment;
  • National/regional authorities or agencies that implement some form of research assessment;
  • Public or private research funding organisations;
  • Research centres, research infrastructures;
  • Universities;
  • Other relevant non-for-profit organisations that implement some form of research assessment.
• Applications from faculties of universities are also eligible. However, the application needs to be formally in the name of the university (applicant), and not the faculty.
• As the call is meant to support institutions from across the European Research Area (ERA), only legal entities based in the EU Member States and countries associated to the Horizon Europe Framework Programme for Research and Innovation are eligible to apply.

Ineligibility Criteria

• To ensure diversity in the allocation of resources, beneficiaries of the first round of the CoARA Boost Cascade Funding are not eligible to apply.

For more information, visit European Commission.