Research for the Norwegian Food Safety Authority

Only approved Norwegian research organisations are eligible to apply. See the list of approved research organisations.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner 

The Project Owner organisation must be a research organisation. 

The research organisation listed as the Project Owner in the application form must have approved the submission of the application. 

Requirements relating to the project manager 

You must have an approved doctoral degree or achieved associate professor qualifications before the application deadline. For the purposes of this call, being or having been employed as researcher 1, researcher 2 or senior researcher in the institute sector is considered to be associate professor competence. 

The Project Manager must be employed by the Project Owner or by one of the partners. 

Requirements relating to partners 

Only approved research organisations (see "Who is eligible to apply?" above) or equivalent research organisations in other countries may be partners and receive funding for a Researcher Project. 

Other types of organisations, including companies and other enterprises, may not be partners in research projects. 

Read more about partners.  

As the Project Owner and/or partner in the project, you can engage subcontractors to deliver services and contribute to the implementation of certain tasks in the project. Subcontractors cannot be given rights to project results. Organisations that are subject to the regulations for public procurement must in the usual way carry out the selection of subcontractors in line with these regulations. It is not possible to have R&D suppliers in the project. 

One and the same actor cannot have two different roles in the project. This means that a subcontractor cannot be the Project Owner or a partner in the project at the same time. 

You can apply for funding to cover the actual costs necessary to carry out the project. The Project Owner must obtain information on costs from the partners in the project. These costs must be entered in the cost plan under the cost type to which they belong. 

We require that you break down the project budget into the following cost types in your application: 

• payroll and indirect expenses, which are costs incurred by the Project Owner and partners in the public sector, research organisations and Norwegian industry  
• other operating expenses, which are costs for other activities that are necessary to carry out the project's R&D activities. Any purchases from subcontractors must be entered here. All costs entered as "other operating expenses" must be specified in the application.  
• equipment, which includes operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment necessary to carry out the project  

The cost type procurement of R&D services shall not be used.  

If doctoral and postdoctoral research fellows are included in the project and there are specific plans for them to stay abroad, this may be included in the application.

You can find detailed and important information about what to enter in the project budget on the website.   

Scope of support 

Funding of up to NOK 8 million per project may be awarded under this call. There are no requirements for own financing, but for the higher education sector, the Research Council requires some own financing of researcher time. 

Ethics

The Research Council requires a high standard of research ethics in the projects we fund, and ethics is included in the assessment criterion for Research Quality. In the template for the project description, there is a separate section that deals with this. The description of ethics is first and foremost an assurance to the peers that there is a plan in place to deal with the most important ethical dilemmas in the project. If you need to describe this in more detail, this can be done elsewhere in the project description, for example under method selection, or you can do so in the data management plan(s) (see below). 

The responsibility for compliance with the research ethics standard lies with the individual researcher and research institution (cf. The Act on the Organisation of Research Ethics). 

The panel's assessment and the Research Council's decision on funding do not entail any research ethics approval.

Conditions for funding 

The projects must start between 01.10.2025 and 01.04.2026. The latest permitted project completion date is 01.04.2032. 

Support for a research organisation goes to the organisation's non-economic activity. It therefore does not constitute state aid. The Research Council assumes that the necessary accounting separation is in place. 

In addition, you must be aware of the following if you should receive an award from us: 

• The project manager and the Project Owner must have assessed and managed any issue of research security in the project. Research security refers to the risks related to undesirable transfer of knowledge and technology, malign influence on research and innovation or violations of research ethics or integrity, where knowledge and technology are used to undermine key societal values.
• The Research Council's prerequisites for awards can also be found in our general terms and conditions for R&D projects on the information page What the contract involves.  
• Grant recipients in research organisations and the public sector (Project Owners and partners) have action plans for gender equality (GEPs) available on their websites. This must be in place before the contract is signed for projects with grants from us. The requirement does not apply to the private sector, interest groups or the voluntary sector.   
• The Research Council requires full and immediate open access for scientific articles, see Plan S - open access to publications.  
• For all projects that handle data, the Project Owner must prepare a data management plan in connection with the revised application, where you will find more information about the requirements for data management plans in projects that receive funding from us.  
• For medical and health studies involving humans, the Research Council sets special requirements and guidelines for prospective registration of studies and publication of results. 

You can change and submit the application several times until the application deadline. We recommend that you submit your application as soon as you have completed the application form and uploaded the required attachments. When the application deadline expires, it is the version of the application that was submitted most recently that we process. 

Mandatory attachments 

• Project description of maximum 11 pages.  Use the default template that you can download at the bottom of the page. 
• CV for project manager of maximum 4 pages. Use the default template that you can download at the bottom of the page. 
• CV for key participants in the project, maximum 4 pages each. Use the default template that you can download at the bottom of the page. 

Applications that do not meet the requirements above will be rejected. 

Optional attachments 

If you wish, you can attach a brief description of competence or suggestions for up to three peers you believe would be suitable to assess your application. We are not obliged to use the proposals, but can do so if necessary. 

All attachments to the application must be submitted with the application. We do not accept attachments submitted after the application deadline unless we have requested additional documentation. 

We will not consider documents and websites linked to in the application, or attachments other than those specified above. Be careful to upload the correct attachment type, as there are no technical restrictions on what kind of templates it is possible to upload in the application form. 

Applications will be assessed in light of the purpose of the call and the following criteria:

We will assess your application as it has been submitted. 

Once the application deadline has passed, we will first check that all formal requirements have been met. Applications that do not satisfy the formal requirements will be rejected. 

The Research Council of Norway may reject applications where the Project Owner or any partner has significantly breached its obligations in other projects funded by the Research Council within the two years prior to the submission of the application. 

The application may be rejected if the project manager has been convicted of misconduct by the Joint Integrity Committee or the Investigation Committee in the last two years prior to the submitted application.

The applications will then be assessed by an international referee panel. After the panel assessment has been completed, the applications will be assessed with regard to their relevance to the call. The administration then writes a recommendation with recommendations to the appropriating board, which ultimately makes a decision on which project(s) will receive funding. 

See also: How we process applications.   

We expect to publish which applications will be awarded by 27 September 2025.