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Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility

Published 15 Apr 2021

Last updated 17 Oct 2022
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Published 15 Apr 2021
Last updated 17 Oct 2022
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Application typeResearcher Project
Application deadline2 February 2022, 13:00 CET
Relevant thematic areas for this callGround-breaking research
Target groupsResearch organisations
Funding scaleNOK 3 000 000-4 300 000
Amount of funding presumed available for this call for proposalsNOK 40 000 000
Project duration36-36 months
Contact for the call
ResearcherProjectResearcherProject@rcn.no

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Mandatory attachment

Purpose

Funding is intended to increase international mobility and promote career development among researchers at an early stage in their careers, as well as to facilitate knowledge transfer to research groups in Norway. The call is targeted towards researchers at the post-doctoral level who are to spend two years at a research organisation abroad and the third year at a research organisation in Norway. Grant proposals will be accepted for projects within all disciplines and research areas.

About the call for proposals

Grant applications will be accepted for projects in all disciplines and research areas, and funding is available for both basic and applied research projects.

It will be possible to create and fill in an application form from 15 December.

Requirements apply to the project manager’s experience; see the section ‘Requirements for this application type’. Funding under this call is for researchers at the post-doctoral level who are to spend two years at a research organisation abroad and the third year at a research organisation in Norway.

You can only be the project manager for one application submitted for either a Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility (this call), Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal, Researcher Project for Young Talents (deadline 2 February 2022),  Knowledge-building Project for Industry  or Collaborative Project to meet Societal and Industry-related Challenges (deadline 9 February 2022).

 The Norwegian-language call for proposals is the legally binding version.

Who is eligible to apply?

Only approved Norwegian research organisations may apply. See here for the list of approved Norwegian research organisations.

Who can participate in the project?

Requirements relating to the Project Owner

The research organisation listed as the Project Owner in the grant application must have approved the submission of the grant application to the Research Council.

Requirements relating to project managers

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 June 2022, 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 your doctoral dissertation. You must have defended your dissertation no earlier than 2 February 2015.

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

Rules for subtracting time

You may apply to subtract time used in connection with statutory leaves of absence, compulsory military service (up to 12 months for this) or continuous full-time and/or part-time sick leave equal to at least eight weeks' full-time absence.

The periods to be subtracted must have taken place after the doctoral defence.

You are required to submit documentation of the time you are asking to subtract with your grant application. You must also enter the time deduction in the application form. We accept documentation from the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV), physicians/health services and employers. Documentation from current or former supervisors is not sufficient. If you are providing documentation from an employer, it must come from the employer’s administration department, such as the HR department.

The documentation must be submitted in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English, or must be accompanied by a certified translation into one of these languages.

We follow the rules for leaves of absence set out in the Norwegian Working Environment Act, and you may apply to subtract time for any leaves of absence you would have been entitled to if you had lived in Norway at the time. For example, you may subtract time for parental leave in a country that does not have statutory parental leave, provided that you actually took parental leave. You must be able to document the leave as described above.
  • 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.
  • As of the application submission deadline, you must have lived or worked in Norway for at least 12 months in the past seven years.
  • You must be employed by the Project Owner (Norwegian research organisation) for the entire duration of the project period.
  • You must have taken a master’s degree or PhD at a Norwegian research organisation.

You can only be the project manager for one application submitted for either a Three-year Researcher Project with International Mobility (this call), Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal, Researcher Project for Young Talents (deadline 2 February 2022),  Knowledge-building Project for Industry  or Collaborative Project to meet Societal and Industry-related Challenges (deadline 9 February 2022).

Requirements relating to partners

Only approved Norwegian research organisations (see the section ‘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, may not be project partners in Researcher Projects.

As the Project Owner and/or a project partner, you may hire subcontractors to provide services and contribute to individual tasks in the project. We will not award support that constitutes state aid under this call, which means that R&D providers cannot be included.

Read more about partners here.

Subcontractors cannot be granted any rights to project results. Organisations that are subject to the regulations governing public procurements must, in the normal manner, select subcontractors in accordance with these regulations. We will not award funding that constitutes state aid under this call. R&D providers cannot be included in the project.

A project participant may not be assigned two different roles in the project. This means that a sub-contractor for the project may not have the role of Project Owner or partner in the same project.

What can you seek funding for?

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 in the cost plan under the relevant category.

Funding may be granted for the following costs:

  • Payroll and indirect expenses: Own payroll expenses for three years.
  • Costs of settling in and other extra costs in connection with the research stay abroad: Research grants abroad for the first 12 months abroad.
  • Equipment. This encompasses operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment and research infrastructure necessary for the execution of the project.
  • Operating expenses, which comprise costs for other activities that are necessary to carry out R&D efforts under the project. Procurements from subcontractors that exceed NOK 100,000 must be specified.

Scope of funding

You may apply for a minimum of NOK 3.0 million and a maximum of NOK 4.3 million to cover project costs.

Own payroll expenses for three years

The following rates apply:

2022

2023

2024

2025

 1 190 000

 1 225 700

1 262 471

 1 300 345


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

Research stays abroad for the first 12 months abroad

The grant for research stays abroad must be entered in the calendar year the project starts. See the Research Council’s rates. 

Conditions for funding

The Research Council will not award funding that constitutes state aid under this call. This means that funding is only to go to your non-economic activity. We require a clear separation of accounts for the organisation’s economic and non-economic activities. Our requirements relating to allocation and disbursement of support for the first year and any pledges and payments for subsequent years are set out in the General Terms and Conditions for R&D Projects to be found on our information page What the contract involves.

If your project is awarded funding, the following must be in place before you submit your revised grant application:

  • From 2022, all grant recipients that are research organisations or public sector bodies (Project Owners and partners) must have a Gender Equality Plan (GEP)available on their website. This must be in place when they sign the grant agreement for projects awarded funding from the Research Council. The requirement does not apply to the business sector, special interest organisations or the non-profit sector.
  • The Research Council requires full and immediate open access to scientific publications; see Plan S – open access to publications.
  • You must prepare a data management plan for any research data handled in the project. The data must be made available in accordance with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).The Project Owner is responsible for selecting which archiving solution(s) to use for storing research data generated during the project.

Relevant thematic areas for this call

Ground-breaking research

Practical information

Requirements for this application type

Applications 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 grant 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.

The application must meet the following requirements:

  • The grant application and all attachments must be submitted in English.
  • All mandatory attachments must be included.
  • Requirements relating to the project manager and Project Owner (research organisation) must be satisfied.
  • The project period is three years. You will spend the first two years at a research organisation abroad and the last year at a Norwegian research organisation. If necessary, up to two months at the Norwegian organisation can be moved to the beginning of the project period.
  • The project must start between 15 September 2022 and 15 February 2023.
  • Funding must be sought from the Research Council for the year the project starts.

Applications that do not satisfy the requirements listed above may be rejected.

Mandatory attachments

The mandatory attachments must be prepared using designated templates found at the end of the call. 

  • A project description, maximum 11 pages.
  • A CV for the project manager, maximum four pages.
  • An invitation letter from the abroad research organisation (this does not have a designated template).
  • A letter of recommendation from the Norwegian research organisation where a plan is given for the reintegration and for the transfer of knowledge to Norway during the third year (this does not have a designated template, and should be of maximum one page).
  • A description of the project’s relevance to the selected topic(s). This is mandatory for all topics under the call except for Ground-breaking research (FRIPRO). (To be uploaded under Attachments/Other items in the application form.)

Optional attachments

  • CVs of key project participants not exceeding four pages each. You must use the CV template found at the end of the call.
    • 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 enclose a short description of qualifications or propose up to three referees who are presumed to be qualified to review their grant proposal. The Research Council is not under any obligation to use the proposed referees, but may use them as needed.

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

Assessment criteria

We assess applications in light of the objectives of the application type in question and on the basis of the following criteria:

Excellence – potential for advancing the state-of-the-art

The extent to which the proposed work is ambitious, novel, and goes beyond the state-of-the-art
• Scientific creativity and originality.
• Novelty and boldness of hypotheses or research questions.
• Potential for development of new knowledge beyond the current state-of-the-art, including significant theoretical, methodological, experimental or empirical advancement.

Excellence – quality of R&D activities

The quality of the proposed R&D activities
• Quality of the research questions, hypotheses and project objectives, and the extent to which they are clearly and adequately specified.
• Credibility and appropriateness of the theoretical approach, research design and use of scientific methods. Appropriate consideration of interdisciplinary approaches.
• The extent to which appropriate consideration has been given to ethical issues, safety issues, gender dimension in research content, and use of stakeholder/user knowledge if appropriate.

Impact

Potential for enhancement of the career prospects of the researcher
• The extent to which the project, including the choice of the host institution abroad, will enhance the potential and future career prospects of the researcher.
• Quality and appropriateness of the training and supervision of the researcher, and of the integration in the host institutions.
• Potential for transfer of knowledge from the host institution abroad to the Norwegian host institution during the third year of the project.

Potential impact of the proposed research
• Potential for academic impact:
The extent to which the planned outputs of the project address important present and/or future scientific challenges
• Potential for societal impact (if addressed by the applicant):
The extent to which the planned outputs of the project address UN Sustainable Development Goals or other important present and/or future societal challenges.
• The extent to which the potential impacts are clearly formulated and plausible.

Communication and exploitation
• Quality and scope of communication and engagement activities with different target audiences, including relevant stakeholders/users.

Implementation

The quality of the project manager and project group
• The extent to which the project manager has relevant expertise and experience, and demonstrated ability to perform high-quality research (as appropriate to the career stage).
• The degree of complementarity of the participants and the extent to which the project group has the necessary expertise needed to undertake the research effectively.

The quality of the project organisation and management
• Effectiveness of the project organisation, including the extent to which resources assigned to work packages are aligned with project objectives and deliverables.
• Appropriateness of the allocation of tasks, ensuring that all participants have a valid role and adequate resources in the project to fulfil that role.
• Appropriateness of the proposed management structures and governance.

Administrative procedures

We will assess the version of your application that you submit and will not take into account how an identical or almost identical application has been assessed in the past.

The applications are first considered through a common process by a set of referee panels composed on the basis of the research content of the applications.

When we prioritise between applications when preparing our ranked lists for the portfolio boards, we carry out a portfolio assessment that takes account of the following:

  • the applications’ assigned marks based on the assessments;
  • the relative volume and quality of grant applications within the same topic under other calls in 2022;
  • any changes in the financial or scientific framework set by the ministries;
  • that priority will be given to projects led by women project managers when the applications are otherwise considered to be on a par.

More information will follow later. Read more about the application review process here.

Download templates

Mandatory attachment

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