Today, 12 national research funding organisations, with the support of Science Europe, launch Weave, a cross-European initiative to fund and support excellent international research projects. It is the first time a large network of this scale has developed an initiative of this kind to enable bilateral and trilateral scientific cooperation in Europe.
Weave aims to simplify the submission and selection procedures of collaborative research proposals involving researchers from up to three European countries or regions with a single evaluation. It makes use of existing national or regional funding programmes, through which research projects will be financed. It seeks to make it easier for researchers to collaborate across borders. It also has ambitions to increase the capacity of researchers to freely determine the composition, focus and content of their projects.
Weave builds on the Lead Agency Procedure, through which a single funding organisation evaluates proposals put forward by an international team of researchers and communicates the funding recommendation to the other funders involved. In practice, the researchers choose a coordinating applicant, who submits the joint proposal to the respective Weave funding organisation in their country or region.
“We fully support the Weave initiative, and its effort to promote bilateral and trilateral scientific cooperation within Europe,” said Lidia Borrell-Damián, Science Europe Secretary General. “Innovative projects like Weave strongly contribute to strengthening international research collaboration and the realisation of the European Research Area.”
The Weave signatories have developed, with the support of Science Europe, an interactive online tool that researchers can use to determine the relevant funding opportunities for their projects.
As of 2021, the National Science Centre will continue to cooperate with the following partner institutions within the framework of WEAVE:
- Austrian Science Fund – Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF) from Austria,
- Czech Science Foundation – Grantová agentura České Republiky (GAČR) from the Czech Republic,
- Slovenian Research Agency – Javna agencija za raziskovalno dejavnost Republike Slovenije (ARRS) from Slovenia,
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) from Switzerland, and
- German Research Foundation – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) from Germany.
The NCN is intending to extend the cooperation in the nearest future to include other research funding institutions to participate in the WEAVE scheme.
At the NCN, the WEAVE call for NCN proposals covering all academic disciplines will be carried out in two separate calls, depending on the lead institution (a foreign partner institution or the NCN), i.e.:
- under the WEAVE-UNISONO call for NCN proposals, in the case of which joint proposals will be submitted to and evaluated by the foreign partner institutions acting as the lead agencies (in 2021: FWF, GAČR, ARRS, SNSF or DFG); more information on the terms of the call will be available on the NCN’s website on 4 January 2021;
- under the September edition of the OPUS call for NCN funding proposals for research projects carried out pursuant to the LAP cooperation and evaluated by the NCN as the lead agency.
Contact: