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Autonomous Funding Opportunities

Last update: 01/03/2018

While enetCollect did at fostering medium and large project proposals involving consortia composed of enetCollect members, it also encouraged its members to pursue autonomously a number of “smaller” funding opportunities as a single entity or with few partners, especially for implementing and testing new research ideas.

This page is dedicated to the autonomous “smaller” funding opportunities and aimed at providing enetCollect members with useful links to these opportunities. We had identified four categories (see below).

Index:
  1. COST-related funding schemes
  2. Funding opportunities requiring limited proposal writing efforts
  3. Marie Curie Individual Fellowships
  4. Marie Curie Co-Funding of regional, national and international programmes
COST-related fundings

Some COST partner countries provide funding opportunities for project proposals defined in relation with an existing COST Action.

If you are aware of a COST-related funding opportunity that is not listed above, please let us know!

Funding opportunities requiring limited proposal writing efforts

A number of funding opportunities allow to try project ideas without requesting too consequent amount of efforts in the proposal writing step. Do note that, because of their nature, they tend to be highly competitive.

If you are aware of a funding opportunity requiring limited proposal writing efforts that is not listed above, please let us know!

Marie Curie Individual Fellowships

Marie Curie Individual Fellowships (MCIF) fund researchers looking to enhance their career development and prospects by working abroad. The grant provides a generous allowance to cover your living, travel and family costs. The grant is awarded to your host organisation, usually a university, research centre or a company in Europe. The research costs and overheads of the host organisation(s) are also supported. European Fellowships last from one to two years, Global Fellowships from two to three years. More information about MCIFs is available on the dedicated Horizon2020 website.

In enetCollect, we believed MCIFs and COST Actions are natural allies with mutually beneficial added values. Indeed, as added values for a Cost Action, a MCIF proposal formalizes new research ideas and, if funded, provides funding for implementing and testing them by MCIF grantees (that usually are very capable Post Doc researchers). In addition, MCIFs usually cover the travel expenses of MCIF grantees, thus allowing to use COST funding for other members.  At the same time, as added values for a MCIF grantees, a COST Action provides direct access to a large network of stakeholders, put their research in the spotlight and, accordingly, enhance their career perspectives.

For all the above-mentioned reasons, the chairs welcomed such project proposals and gladly offered support for those for wish to prepare a proposal.

As an indicative and not-so-precise (yet relevant) rule of thumb, a MCIF application requires a preparation time of 0.5 to 2 weeks full time for an host and 3 to 5 weeks full time for an applicant.

Marie Curie Co-Funding of regional, national and international programs

The Marie Curie COFUND scheme aims to stimulate regional, national or international programs to foster excellence in researchers’ training, mobility and career development, spreading the best practices of Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions. Under this framework, the fellowships are co-funded by the European Union and a local, regional, national or international entity and the selection of the fellows is made by the co-funding entity. In short, the fellowships are equivalent to the MCIF ones but the range of host institutions is limited to a given local, regional, national or international scope and accordingly, the resulting competition can be (often enough) far less fierce than the overarching MCIF one happening in all Europe.

In this section, we only list and classify by country the opportunities that have a regional, national or international scope and were relevant to enetCollect’s thematics. Indeed, if such an opportunity was available in the local context of enetCollect members’ respective institutions, we expect that they would already know about them. Nonetheless, if you wish to double-check, go to this page, select “MSCA-COFUND” as “Programmes” and choose your country in “Countries”.

If you are aware of a MSCA-cofund funding opportunity that is not listed above, please let us know!

 

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