Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility

The call is open to approved Norwegian research organisations. See here for the list of approved Norwegian research organisations.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner
The research organisation is to be entered as the Project Owner in the application form, and must have authorised the submission of the grant application to the Research Council.

Requirements related to the project manager
You must have completed a doctorate before project start-up. If you have not formally submitted your doctoral dissertation at the time of submission of the grant application, you must forward confirmation that you have submitted your dissertation at the earliest possible date, and at the latest by 1 November 2020, otherwise the grant application will be rejected. Send the confirmation in PDF format by email to post@forskningsradet.no, and label it with the project number and name of the project manager.

As of the application submission deadline, no more than seven years may have passed since the date of defence of the applicant’s doctoral dissertation. You must have defended your dissertation no earlier than 6 May 2013. The dates given for the requirements for experience and age are fixed even though the submission deadline for grant applications has been postponed to 20 May.

If more than seven years have passed, you may apply to subtract statutory leaves of absence, compulsory military or civilian service and/or sick leave in accordance with our rules for subtracting time.

• It is not possible to receive funding for a Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility more than once.
• As of the application submission deadline, you may not have lived or worked in the country of the host institution for more than 12 months in the past three years.
• You must be employed by the Project Owner (Norwegian research organisation) for the entire duration of the project period.

An individual may serve as project manager for only one grant application submitted for a Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal, Researcher Project for Young Talents or Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility (this call) for the 20 May 2020 deadline. If you are the project manager for a Researcher Project, Young Research Talent Project or Mobility Grant that received funding after the deadline 10 April 2019, you may not submit an application for the 20 May 2020 deadline.

There is no restriction on the number of applications on which you may be listed as a partner.

Requirements relating to partners
Only approved Norwegian research organisations (see under “Who is eligible to apply?” above) and corresponding research organisations in other countries are eligible to be partners and to receive Researcher Project funding.

Other types of organisations, such as companies and other undertakings, are not eligible to receive support for Researcher Projects and may not be project partners, but they may serve as suppliers of R&D services to the project. In such cases, the intellectual property rights related to the result of the supplier’s work activities will become the property of the institution procuring the services. For companies defined as “undertakings” in the state aid rules, it is particularly important to note that the Research Council does not award state aid under Researcher Projects.

See here for more information about the state aid rules.

A project participant may not be assigned two different roles in the project. This means that a supplier of R&D services for the project may not have the role of Project Owner or partner in the same project.

Please see the webpage on “What to enter in the project budget” for details and important information.

You may seek funding to cover actual costs that are necessary to execute the project. The Project Owner is to obtain information about costs from each project partner. These costs are to be entered into the cost plan under the relevant category.

Support may be granted for the following costs:

• Payroll and indirect expenses: Own payroll expenses for three years.
• Procurement of R&D services. The Project Owner and partners may purchase R&D-related services from public and private suppliers individually or together.
• Equipment, for operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment and research infrastructure necessary for the execution of the project.
• Other operating expenses, which comprise costs for other activities that are necessary to carry out R&D efforts under the project. Here you may enter up to two round-trip tickets between Norway and the host country

Scope of funding
You may apply for a minimum of NOK 3.0 million and a maximum of NOK 3.9 million from the Research Council to cover project costs. You can use this spreadsheet in calculating the costs.

Own payroll expenses for three years

For the first two years (to be spent abroad), the following rates apply: 

For the third year (to be spent in Norway) the following rates apply:

These rates include overhead costs for the research organisations abroad and in Norway.

Research stays abroad for the first 12 months abroad
See the Research Council’s rates. The amount will be entered automatically if you use the spreadsheet above.

Conditions for funding
The Research Council will not award support that constitutes state aid under this call. This means that the Research Council funding must only go to the non-economic activity of the research organisations. The Research Council requires a clear separation of accounts for the organisation’s economic and non-economic activities. Companies will not be eligible to receive support to cover projects costs and may not receive indirect support through the granting of any rights to project results.

The Research Council’s requirements relating to allocation and disbursement of support for the first year and any pledges for subsequent years are set out in the General Terms and Conditions for R&D Projects.

The Project Owner (research organisation) is responsible for selecting the archiving solution(s) to use for storing research data generated during the project. The Project Owner must specify the planned solution(s) in connection with the revised grant proposal.

The Research Council of Norway has specific requirements and guidelines for prospective registration and disclosure of medical and health related studies involving human participants.

The grant application form must be created and submitted via “My RCN Web”. You may revise and resubmit your grant application form multiple times up to the application submission deadline. We recommend that you submit your application as soon as you have filled in the application form and included all mandatory attachments. After the deadline, it is the most recently submitted version of the grant application that will be processed.

Applications that do not satisfy the following requirements will be rejected:

• The grant application, including all attachments, must be submitted in English.
• All mandatory attachments must be included.
• Requirements relating to the project manager must be satisfied.
• Requirements relating to the Project Owner (research organisation) must be satisfied.
• The project period must be three years. The first two years are to be spent at a research organisation abroad, and the third year at a Norwegian research organisation. When necessary, up to two months of the time to be spent at the Norwegian research organisation may be moved to the beginning of the project period.
• The project must start between 1 January 2021 and 1 August 2021.
• Funding must be sought from the Research Council for 2021.

Attachments

The designated templates must be used. They will be found at the end of the call for proposals.

Mandatory attachments

• A project description, maximum 11 pages.
• A letter of invitation from the host institution abroad.
• A CV for the project manager, maximum four pages. 
• Any documentation required to establish time deductions for the experience requirements, when relevant. To be uploaded under Attachments/Other items

Optional attachments

• CVs for the key project participants. Each CV must not exceed four pages; CVs that exceed the maximum length will not be included in the application review process.
• Applicants themselves are to decide which project participants are most important and in which cases it will be of significance to the review process to assess these participants’ qualifications.

• Applicants are free to propose up to three referees who are presumed to be impartial and qualified to review the grant proposal.
• To ensure impartiality, we do not use referees who have their place of employment in Norway. The Research Council is not under any obligation to use the proposed referees, but may use them as needed. 

Attachments other than those specified above as mandatory or optional, as well as any links to websites in the grant application, will not be included in the application review process.

Grant applications will be assessed in relation to the following criteria:

See the timeline at the bottom of this page for an overview of the schedule for the various stages of the application processing.

Referee panel review

The administrative procedure described here may be subject to changes due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The referee panel review forms the core of the application processing procedure. All applications for a Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal, Researcher Project for Young Talents and Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility will be assessed by a common set of international referee panels.

Grant applications will be distributed to the panels on the basis of their research content. Your application will be assessed once, by the referees in a single panel, regardless of whether you have selected one or multiple topics for your application.

For each grant application, we check to ensure that the panel has sufficient expertise to review the application’s research topic. When needed, assessments from individual external specialists will be obtained to support the panel in reaching a consensus-based assessment.

All the referees will review each grant application and assign marks for each of the assessment criteria Excellence, Impact and Implementation, as well as a mark for overall assessment of the application, prior to having a discussion of the grant applications. The panel reviews the projects and discusses and reaches a consensus on a final mark for each criterion. The referee panel’s mark for overall assessment is assigned based on a discretionary, general review in which each assessment criterion is weighted approximately equally, and the application is considered in light of the primary objective of a Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility. A written explanation of the assessment is drawn up in consensus.

Grant applications that receive a mark of 4 or lower in the overall assessment will not be awarded funding. The applicant will in this case receive feedback consisting of the marks assigned for the individual criteria and overall assessment and the written comments in the overall assessment.

Ranking of grant applications
The elements to be stressed when establishing the order of priority between projects will be described under each topic under the heading “Prioritisation of grant applications”. The Research Council uses this to draw up a recommendation for the portfolio board on which applications to fund. The portfolio board is responsible for taking the final funding decisions. We often provide the portfolio board with alternative suggested rankings to make it easier to choose which considerations to emphasise within the available budget.

Please note that the amount of funding announced, overall and per individual topic, represents the estimated amount of funding available. The final amounts allocated may deviate somewhat from these estimates. This may be due to changes in the financial framework or to the number and quality of grant applications received viewed in light of other calls for proposals.