Norwegian Centre for Research at CERN

The Project Owner must be an approved Norwegian research organisation that the parties to the NorCC collaboration agree to apply on their behalf. See here for the list of approved Norwegian research organisations.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner  

• The Project Owner organisation must be a Norwegian approved research organisation. 
• The research organisation listed as the Project Owner in the application form must have approved the submission of the application. 
• The Project Owner organisation submits the application on behalf of all the partners. 

Requirements relating to the project manager  

• The project manager (centre manager) must document experience from managing large, complex projects. 
• The project manager must be employed by the Project Owner or by one of the partners. 
• You must state the availability and planned time spent on the tasks as project manager, work package leaders and for any other members of the centre management in the application. 
• The project manager and other project management's professional competence and suitability to carry out the project will be assessed by the expert panel. 

Requirements relating to partners 

• The research in the centre will be carried out in binding collaboration between research organisations.  
• The application must be strategically anchored with all partners. 
• All partners must actively contribute to the planning, follow-up and dissemination of results from the centre. 

Types of organisations other than research organisations, including companies and other enterprises, are not eligible to be partners in the project and receive funding. However, they may be subcontractors of services to the project. Any intellectual property rights related to the results of the supplier's work accrue to the contracting authority. 

You can apply for funding to cover the actual costs necessary to carry out the activities in 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.  

The Project Owner and other partners in the centre must contribute with own funding as part of the funding of the centre. It is not possible to use funding from other Research Council-funded projects as part of the funding from the Project Owner and partners. 

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

• payroll and indirect costs, which are costs incurred by the Project Owner and partners in the public sector, research organisations and the Norwegian business sector. Partial financing of positions within CERN's recruitment programmes is also entered here. 
• other operating costs, which are costs for other activities necessary to carry out the project's R&D activities. Any purchases from subcontractors must be entered here. The same applies to the operation and maintenance of selected experiments at CERN (as agreed in an Memorandum of Understanding of the experiment), necessary obligations in the same experiments, the Norwegian Industrial Liaison Officer for CERN, dissemination and mobilization activities, and membership and participation in selected international committees for particle and nuclear physics. All costs entered as "other operating expenses" must be specified in the application. 

You must not use the cost types equipment or procurement of R&D services. 

You will find detailed and important information about what the budget should contain on the website.  

Scope of support 

Funding of up to NOK 255 million may be awarded to one project under this call. Reservations are made regarding the necessary budget decision. 

You can apply for funding of up to 50 per cent of the budgeted project costs.  

Prerequisites for the award of funding 

To ensure continuity, the project must be ready to start on 01.01.28. The latest permitted project completion is 31.12.2035.  

We do not award state aid under this call. We assume that the research is carried out in effective collaboration as defined in the state aid rules: 

"Cooperation between at least two independent parties to exchange knowledge or technology or to achieve a common goal on the basis of division of labour, where the parties jointly define the scope of the collaborative project, contribute to its implementation and share risks and results. One or more parties can bear all the costs of the project and thus exempt other parties from financial risk. Commissioned research and the provision of research services are not considered to be a form of collaboration." 

The following guidelines apply: 

• Support for the research organisations in the centre goes to the organisations' non-economic activity. It therefore does not constitute state aid. The Research Council assumes that the necessary accounting separation is in place. 
• Companies are not eligible to receive funding to cover project costs. Business actors and others who are to be regarded as enterprises in the sense of state aid law will thus not be reimbursed for any of their costs in connection with participation in the centre. 
• Rights to project results shall be regulated so that companies participating in the centre do not receive indirect funding from participating research partners. The regulation of the rights must therefore be in line with the ESA's guidelines on aid for research, development and innovation, section 28. This means that rights to IPR from the project must be allocated to the various partners in a way that fully reflects their work packages, contributions and respective interests. 

The Research Council's prerequisites for allocating and disbursing funding for the first year, and any commitments and disbursements for subsequent years, are set out in our general terms and conditions for R&D projects , which you can find in full on the information page What the contract consists of.  

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 Excellence. 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 ensuring that the research ethics standard is followed lies with the individual researcher and research institution (cf. the Act on the Organisation of Research Ethics Work). The panel's assessment and the Research Council's decision on the award do not entail any approval of research ethics. 

Other prerequisites 

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

• 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 consists of. 
• The project manager and the Project Owner must have assessed and handled the consideration of research security in the project. Research security refers to risks associated with unwanted transfer of knowledge and technology, impact on research and innovation, or breaches of research ethics/integrity where knowledge and technology are used to undermine key societal values. 
• Grant recipients in research organisations and the public sector (Project Owners and partners) must have gender equality plans (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. Here you will find more information about 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. 

The centre must be well organized and managed. The centre must have a board and a general manager (centre manager). The centre has a broad responsibility for participation at CERN and must be a unifying force for the Norwegian CERN community. The centre will be organised in a way that is able to prioritise and distribute funds in a balanced manner. The work of the centre must be firmly anchored in the participating institutions, so that the centre's board can have the authority to make decisions on behalf of all the partners.  

The centre will have a mid-term assessment halfway through the 8-year period. The centre must set aside funds for the evaluation.

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 mandatory attachments. When the application deadline expires, it is the version of the application that was submitted most recently that we process. 

• The application and all attachments must be written in English. 
• All attachments must be in PDF format. 

Mandatory attachments  

• Project description of a maximum of 20 pages. Use the standard template that you can download at the bottom of the page.   
• CV for project manager (centre manager) of maximum 4 pages. Use the standard template that you can download at the bottom of the page.  
• CV for work package managers of a maximum of 4 pages per CV. Use the standard template that you can download at the bottom of the page. 
• Description of relevance of a maximum of one page. Uploaded as attachment type "Other".  
• Declarations of intent from the Project Owner, organisation and all registered partners. Letters of intent must be a maximum of three pages and in English. The declarations shall include the following:  
  • The partner must confirm their intention to participate actively as a partner in the centre and describe how this will be done in practice.  
  • The partner must justify their interest in participating in the centre. In what way will the centre's activities benefit the partner and create opportunities that would not be there without the centre?  
  • The partner must summarize its contribution to the centre in the form of knowledge, expertise and any funding, facilities and own efforts over the lifetime of the centre.  
  • The partner must account for its own long-term R&D plans and how it fits with what the centre is going to do (strategic anchoring). 
  • A declaration of intent from the Project Owner must also include a declaration from management stating that the organisation will assume the obligations entailed by a contract with the Research Council. The declaration must also explain how the centre is included in the Project Owner's organisation's academic strategy.  

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

Optional attachments 

• CVs for key participants in the project, use the standard template that you download at the bottom of the page. You will assess which project participants are the most important, and in which cases it will be of importance for the application processing to assess the project participants' qualifications. 
• Submit proposals for up to three international peers who can assess the application. The peers must be impartial and should have broad expertise/approach to the issues in the centre. The Research Council is not obliged to use these peer reviewers. 

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. 

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

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

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

Once the application has been received, we will carry out a preliminary assessment to check that the application meets all the formal requirements. Applications that are considered to be outside the thematic delimitations will be rejected without further assessment.  

Applications that meet all formal requirements will be considered by a panel composed of peer reviewers. The panel makes its assessments of the criteria "Research quality", "Impacts and effects" and "Implementation". They provide a consensus grade for each of these criteria.   

Applications will also be assessed on the basis of the criterion "Relevance to the call" by Research Council case officers.  

The assessment of relevance and the panel's academic assessments are included in the application's main mark. The main grade is a calculated average of the four criteria without weighting.  

Applicants may be invited to an interview with a panel. The panel may adjust the grades for the criteria "Research quality", "Impacts and effects" and "Implementation" up or down. The Research Council may also adjust the mark for the criterion relevance up or down. The interviews are conducted in Oslo or digitally.

The Research Council will base its decision on its recommendation for allocation. The assessment takes the following into account: 

• Grade of the application after interview   
• establishment of a balanced project portfolio that covers the breadth of the areas described in the portfolio plan for the Research System 

The portfolio board for the research system will make the final decision on allocation. 

See also: How we process applications. We expect to publish any decision on the award on approx. 15.02.2027.