The OSCARS Project has just concluded its 1st OSCARS Open Call for Open Science Projects and Services in July using Trust-IT Services’ (Trust-IT) own TRUST-GRANTS™ platform, thereby supporting the transparent and fair open call process in allocating more than €13 million in funds.
The open calls of the OSCARS project are being implemented and managed through the OSCARS Grants Platform which has been built from the TRUST-GRANTS™ customisable grants management solution which has been customised to fit the specific needs of the OSCARS project.
The platform allowed the project to launch the call and collect proposals from hundreds of applicants. Upon closure of the submission phase, the platform allowed the proposals to be evaluated first for eligibility and to check whether evaluators had a conflict of interest. Following this step, evaluators were able to evaluate each proposal.
Commenting on the use of the TRUST-GRANTS™ platform during the call, OSCARS Project Manager Friederike Schmidt-Tremmel said:
“Having a fit-for-purpose platform was necessary to ensure the effective management of the 1st Open Call. The TRUST-GRANTS platform allowed us to safely receive more than 250 proposals, assign evaluators while supporting us in tracking and avoiding any potential conflict of interest, inform the applicants securely about their individual evaluation results and finally create a ranking list the funding decisions could be based on. It made the process easy and smooth for all people involved in the complex process, applicants, call managers and evaluators”.
As a base, the TRUST-GRANTS™ platform’s functionalities and structure has been developed based on Trust-IT’s extensive experience in projects that manage cascading grants. As each cascading grants project is unique in its submission and evaluation procedures, the base TRUST-GRANTS™ is then customised to fit each project’s needs.
Apart from the development and maintenance of the OSCARS Grants Platform, Trust-IT was also in charge of the administrative and financial management of the evaluators. The assignment of evaluators to the proposals was separately managed by the project coordination with support from domain experts.
OSCARS 1st Open Call
The 1st open call resulted 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 (48 projects) have requested a contribution of more than € 200,000. Only eight projects have asked for less.
Learn more about how the 1st open call was organised here: 1st OSCARS Open Call concluded with 58 projects selected.
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 or 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.
Learn more about TRUST-GRANTS™ or reach out to us to see how our cascading grants management solution can make the management of cascading grants easier!
