Announcement of the OPUS 20 call for proposals

Proposals in the call may be submitted by the following entities specified in the NCN Act:

1. universities;
2. federations of science and HE entities;
3. research institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences, operating pursuant to the Act on the Polish Academy of Sciences of 30 April 2010 (Journal of Laws of 2019, item 1183, as amended);
4. research institutes operating pursuant to the Act on Research Institutes of 30 April 2010 (Journal of Laws of 2019, item 1350, as amended);
5. international research institutes established pursuant to separate Acts, operating in the Republic of Poland;

5a. Łukasiewicz Centre operating pursuant to the Act on the Łukasiewicz Research Network of 21 February 2019 (Journal of Laws of 2019, item 534);

5b. institutes operating within the Łukasiewicz Research Network;

6. Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences;
7. other institutions involved in research independently on a continuous basis;
8. groups of entities comprising at least two entities mentioned in sections 1-7 or at least one institution as such together with at least one company;
9. scientific and industrial centres within the meaning of the Act on Research Institutes of 30 April 2010 (Journal of Laws of 2019, item 1350, as amended);
10. research centres of the Polish Academy of Sciences within the meaning of the Act on the Polish Academy of Sciences of 30 April 2010 (Journal of Laws of 2019, item 1183, as amended);
11. scientific libraries;
12. companies operating as R&D centres within the meaning of the Act on Certain Forms of Support for Innovative Activity of 30 May 2008 (Journal of Laws of 2019, item 1402);
13. legal entities with registered office in Poland;
14. natural persons and
15. companies conducting research in another organisational form than laid down in sections 1-13.

A person (whether or not holding a PhD degree) whose scientific achievements include at least one research paper published or accepted for publication may act as the principal investigator. In the case of research in the arts, the principal investigator should have at least one paper published or accepted for publication or at least one artistic achievement or achievement in research in art completed. The proposal should include artistic work and/or achievements covering the period of the last 10 years before the year of the proposal (as of 2010). In specific cases, this period can be extended.

In the case of OPUS LAP proposals, a principal investigator of each research team involved in the project must be named, i.e. two principal investigators in the case of bilateral cooperation and three in the case of trilateral cooperation, including principal investigator for the Polish research team and principal investigator(s) for the foreign research team(s).

Please note: The principal investigator for the Polish research team must reside in Poland for at least 50% of the project duration period. This period includes business trips necessary for the project, in particular involving fieldwork, participation in conferences and/or library and archive research. 

Furthermore, the principal investigator for the Polish research team must be a person employed at the host institution for the Polish part of the research project for the entire project duration period pursuant to at least a part-time employment contract.

The Lead Agency Procedure (LAP) is a new proposal review standard adopted by European research-funding institutions, designed to make it easier for international research teams to seek funding for joint research projects, as well as to streamline the process of proposal review by research-funding institutions. The procedure rests on the following key principles:

• the use of domestic calls carried out by partner agencies to perform merit-based evaluation not only of domestic, but also bilateral and multilateral proposals, which compete on equal terms with national proposals;
• a basis of trust in the quality of peer review among institutions undertaking such cooperation.

This allows for funding proposals for joint projects that involve at least two research teams from different countries to conduct joint research to be reviewed only at one institution, known as the lead agency, relevant to one of the teams, under a scheme from its regular call portfolio. The results of merit-based evaluation performed by the lead agency are approved by all the other institutions co-launching the call, which then award funding to research projects recommended for funding in the course of such evaluation.

In the case of OPUS 20, the LAP cooperation relies on cooperation agreements between the NCN and the following partner institutions:

• FWF – Austrian Science Fund;
• GAČR – Czech Science Foundation;
• ARRS – Slovenian Research Agency;
• DFG – German Research Foundation;
• SNSF – Swiss National Science Foundation.

Pursuant to the cooperation agreements, the NCN as the lead agency under OPUS 20 will perform the merit-based evaluation of OPUS LAP proposals for research projects to be carried out by research teams from Poland, as well as the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Germany or Switzerland.

OPUS 20 is open to funding proposals submitted within the framework of the LAP cooperation (OPUS-LAP proposals):

• bilateral or trilateral cooperation between a Polish research team and teams from Austria, Slovenia or the Czech Republic, whereas the Polish research team must apply to the NCN:
• for at least 40% of the total project budget, as outlined in the budget table (applies to bilateral projects)

or

• for at least 25% of the total project budget, as outlined in the budget table (applies to trilateral projects);

Please note: If a proposal under OPUS LAP is submitted to the NCN as the lead agency and the above conditions are not met, the proposal will be rejected by the NCN and the partner institutions relevant for the foreign teams involved in the project on the grounds that it does not meet the eligibility criteria.

Proposals for research projects carried out in bilateral or trilateral cooperation between research teams from the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and Slovenia in which the FWF, GAČR lub ARRS acts as the lead agency can be submitted under the CEUS-UNISONO call.

• bilateral cooperation between research teams from Poland and Germany; and
• bilateral cooperation between research teams from Poland and Switzerland.

Please note: International cooperation is not obligatory under the OPUS 20 call and proposals submitted together with foreign partners will not be given preferential treatment over those that do not involve such partnerships.

Restrictions on submitting proposals are detailed in Chapter III of the Regulations on awarding funding for research tasks funded by the National Science Centre as regards research projects.

A person may act as the principal investigator under one edition of calls only once which means that in the present edition of NCN calls, one can act as the principal investigator in an OPUS proposal, OPUS LAP proposal, BEETHOVEN CLASSIC proposal, PRELUDIUM BIS proposal or SONATA proposal only once.

Proposals may be submitted to the call covering basic research in any of 25 NCN panels within three areas:

• HS – Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences;
• ST – Physical Sciences and Engineering;
• NZ – Life Sciences.

Proposals shall be reviewed within the panels (e.g. HS1, ST1, NZ1). The principal investigator shall select the panel. If an incorrect panel is selected, proposals may be rejected.

Please note: In the case of OPUS LAP proposals concerning bilateral cooperation between research teams from Poland and Germany, only proposals in the area of Life Sciences and Physical Sciences and Engineering are allowed. Cooperation between research teams from Poland and Germany in the area of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is allowed under Beethoven CLASSIC 4.

Projects can be carried out over the period of:

The terms of the call do not specify the minimum or maximum number of the research team members. Apart from the principal investigators, research tasks in the projects may also be performed by co-investigators, including students, PhD students and post-docs.

Please note that:

• NCN scholarship grantees and persons employed as post-docs and remunerated from the NCN budget must be recruited in an open call procedure;
• researchers who have been awarded a PhD degree by the host institution for the project cannot be employed as post-docs.

The project must include the description of competencies and tasks of individual members of the expert team. The rationale of their involvement in the project is evaluated by the expert team. Detailed information on the costs of salaries can be found in the Types of costs in research projects funded by the National Science Centre.

The project budget must be justified as regards the subject and scope of research and based on realistic calculations. In the OPUS call, the NCN has not set a maximum or minimum amount of the project budget. If an unjustified budget is planned, the proposal may be rejected.

Costs in the project include direct costs and indirect costs.

Direct costs include:

1. remuneration for the principal investigator: 150,000 PLN per annum if the principal investigator is employed pursuant to a full-time employment contract; otherwise, the principal investigator may be paid up to 3,000 PLN per month.
2. remuneration for co-investigators in the project;

• funds for full-time employment of post-doc(s): 120,000 PLN per annum (in well-justified cases this amount may be increased);

• salaries and scholarships for students and PhD students (up to 10,000 PLN per each month of project duration);
• additional remuneration for members of the research team. If the principal investigator is not employed full-time in the project, his/her remuneration shall be paid from the pool allocated for additional remuneration;

3. purchase or manufacturing of research equipment, devices and software;
4. purchase of material and small equipment;
5. outsourced services,
6. business trips, visits and consultations (Please note: For OPUS LAP proposals: the costs of consultations and visits of co-investigators from research institutions that receive parallel project funding from FWF, GAČR, ARRS, DFG or SNSF are not eligible);
7. compensation for collective investigators, and
8. other costs crucial to the research project which comply with the Types of costs in research projects funded by the National Science Centre.

Please note: The costs of publication of monographs containing project results (as defined in §10 of the Regulation on evaluation of the quality of research activity issued by the Minister of Science and Higher Education on 22 February 2019 (Journal of Laws of 2019, item 392) are not eligible until positively reviewed by the NCN.

Indirect costs may be a maximum of 20% of direct costs. The amount of indirect costs is calculated on all direct costs, including costs of research equipment, devices and software. During the project implementation, the host institution shall agree with the principal investigator the coverage of a minimum of 25% of the indirect costs.

Additionally, indirect costs of up to 2% of direct costs may be spent on Open Access to publications and research data.

If an unjustified budget is planned, the proposal may be rejected.

Detailed information on the costs in NCN-funded research projects.

Please note: An OPUS LAP proposal must contain a budget table listing foreign project costs of all foreign research teams involved in the project, drafted in accordance with the respective rules of the FWF, GAČR, ARRS, DFG or SNSF. Choose and complete a budget table sheet in Excel appropriate for the research team.

The budget must include the costs requested by foreign research teams from the FWF, GAČR, ARRS, DFG or SNSF, as well as justifications for all amounts entered. Foreign project budgets in the budget table will be subject to merit-based evaluation to verify whether the project costs are justified as regards the subject and scope of research. Please note: If the costs in the budget table are not justified, the proposal may be rejected.

The costs in the budget table must be entered in EUR (budgets of Austrian, Slovenian and German research teams) or in CZK (budgets of Czech research teams) or in CHF (budgets of Swiss research teams) according to the following exchange rates.

1 EUR = 4.4490 PLN

1 CZK =0.1673 PLN

1 CHF = 4.1334 PLN

OPUS LAP proposals must contain a completed budget table.

Detailed information and examples of the budget table can be found in the Guidelines for Polish research teams submitting OPUS LAP proposals under the OPUS LAP call.

Together with other European research-funding institutions, the National Science Centre is a member cOAlition S. Therefore, the NCN has adopted an “Open access policy” pursuant to which all research results stemming from NCN-funded research projects must be made available in immediate open access.

In accordance with the principles of Plan S, the National Science Centre recognizes the following publication routes as compliant with its open access policy:

1. Publication in open access journals and on open access platforms registered, or with pending registration, in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ);
2. Publication in subscription journals (hybrid journals), as long as the Version of Record (VoR) or the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) is published, by the author or publisher, in an open repository immediately upon the article’s online publication;
3. Publication in journals covered by an open access licence within the framework of so-called transformative agreements, inscribed in the Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges registry (ESAC-registry). 

More information on Open Access publication can be found here.

Information to be provided in the proposals:

Please note: The information below must be provided in English.

Proposals in the call include application for state aid, except where a natural person applies for funding. Detailed information can be found in the State aid section.

In the case of research projects carried out in a host institution for which project funding constitutes state aid, funds for students and PhD students can only be planned in the form described in the category “salary for students and PhD students” in the Types of costs in research projects funded by the NCN.

Please note: All documents concerning proposals for state aid shall be signed with a qualified electronic signature in the PAdES format.

Proposals shall be subject to an eligibility check and merit based-evaluation.

Eligibility check shall be carried out by:

Only complete proposals that comply with all the requirements set out in the call announcement shall be accepted for merit-based evaluation.

Please note: Under OPUS 20, OPUS LAP proposals shall be evaluated together with other proposals submitted to the call.

Proposals approved as eligible shall be subject to merit-based evaluation performed in two stages:

1.    qualification check performed by the expert team appointed by the NCN, based on the data included in the proposal and annexes thereto, with the exception of the full project description. 

Each proposal is evaluated by two members of the expert team acting independently.

Then, based on the discussions, a list of proposals recommended for the second stage of evaluation is drafted by the expert team at the first meeting.

2.    specialist evaluation of proposals recommended for the second stage of evaluation. Proposals are addressed by at least two external experts and evaluated thereby based on the data included in the proposal and annexes thereto, with the exception of the short project description. 

Then, based on the reviews of external experts, a ranking short list of proposals recommended for funding is drafted by the expert team at the second meeting.

The expert team recommends only those OPUS LAP proposals for funding that are among 20% of proposals with the highest rank among all those submitted to the OPUS call under individual NCN review panels. Following the merit-based evaluation, the NCN provides the relevant partner institutions with information on the results thereof together with a list of research projects recommended for funding for their approval. The NCN Director awards funds for research projects to be performed by the Polish research teams, provided that the partner institutions award funds to the foreign research teams.

Additional information on the proposal evaluation procedure can be found in the Detailed procedure of evaluating proposals by expert teams.

Please note: A proposal which contains at least one auxiliary NCN Review Panel other than the one to which the proposal was submitted, which has been specified by the chair as requiring an additional individual review shall be deemed an interdisciplinary proposal. In well-justified cases, interdisciplinary proposals shall be subject to an additional expert review at the first stage of evaluation.

The evaluation of proposals shall focus in particular on:

1. compliance with the criteria of basic research;
2. quality and innovative nature of research or tasks to be performed;
3. impact of the research project on the advancement of the scientific discipline;
4. assessment of the feasibility of the proposed project;
5. scientific achievements of the principal investigator, including publications in renowned academic press/ journals;
6. assessment of the results of research projects conducted by the principal investigator, funded by the NCN or from other sources;
7. principal investigator’s participation in research projects funded under EU Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation;
8. relevance of the costs to be incurred with regards to the subject and scope of the research and
9. in addition, preparation of the proposal and compliance with other requirements set forth in the call announcement shall be reviewed.

In addition, in the evaluation of OPUS LAP proposals:

• a balanced and complementary contribution by all research teams in the project is taken into account. This is to say that the contribution of each team involved in the project must be significant and necessary and their respective tasks should complement one another to create a coherent joint research project;
• academic and research career of foreign principal investigators is evaluated.

Please note: The NEW detailed proposal evaluation criteria are available.

Merit-based evaluation of proposals is performed by the expert team and reviewers. Experts are selected by the NCN Council from among outstanding Polish and foreign researchers who are at least PhD holders. Expert teams are established for each call edition. The composition of the expert team is subject to the number and subjects of proposals submitted to each panel. During the specialist evaluation, proposals recommended for the second stage of evaluation are reviewed by eternal reviewers.

The call results shall be announced on the NCN’s website and communicated to the applicants by way of a decision by the NCN Director as follows:

Read the Information for applicants (OPUS proposals) and Guidelines for Polish research teams submitting OPUS LAP proposals (OPUS LAP proposals) available on the NCN's website.

Should you have any questions, please contact us by e-mail: informacja@ncn.gov.pl or by phone: +48 12 341 90 00.

If you are intending to submit a proposal in the OPUS 20 call:

1. read all call documents included in the call announcement, in particular:
   1. terms of the OPUS 20 call and
   2. OPUS and OPUS LAP proposal form template, where you can find out about information and annexes needed to complete the electronic proposal form in ZSUN/OSF;
   3. Regulations on awarding funding for research tasks funded by the National Science Centre;
   4. proposal submission procedure;

2. obtain data from the host institution for the project that is required to complete the proposal and find out about the internal procedures that may affect the proposal and project performance (cost planned in the project, procedure for acquiring signature(s) or authorised representative(s) of the institution to confirm submission of the proposal); if the applicant is a group of Polish entities, a research project cooperation agreement must be drafted;
3. prepare acceptance letters from publishers confirming that the paper has been accepted for publication (when the scientific achievements section includes papers accepted for publication that have not been published yet).

Before the proposal is submitted to the NCN:

1. check if all information in and annexes to the proposal are correct. The verification of the proposal for completeness in ZSUN/OSF by pressing the Sprawdź kompletność [Check completeness] button does not guarantee that all information has been entered correctly and that the required annexes have been attached;
2. check if the tabs have been completed in the correct language;
3. disable the final version of the proposal to the NCN;
4. download and sign the confirmation of submitting the proposal in the call (principal investigator and authorised representative(s) of the entity);

Please note: In the case of OPUS LAP proposals, the NCN does not require any documents (agreements) confirming the LAP cooperation between Polish and foreign research teams, nor does it require OPUS LAP proposals or documents attached thereto to be signed by members of the foreign research teams.

5. attach the confirmation of submitting the proposal with a signature.

Once the proposal is completed and relevant annexes attached, the proposal shall be submitted to the NCN electronically via the ZSUN/OSF system using the Wyślij do NCN [Send to NCN] button.

In addition, in the case of OPUS LAP proposals, each foreign research team involved in the project must submit a funding proposal, together with a set of required documents, to its respective research funding institution (FWF, GAČR, ARRS, DFG or SNSF) by the date and according to the rules specified thereby. If the partner institution requires applicants to submit a copy of the OPUS LAP proposals to its respective submission system, a complete English language version of the OPUS LAP proposal in PDF format must be generated following submission of the OPUS LAP proposal to the ZSUN/OSF system and sent to the foreign research team.

Once the call for proposals has been closed:

1. evaluation of proposals shall be carried out;
2. after each stage of evaluation, the funding decision by the NCN Director shall be announced;
3. if the proposal is recommended for funding, an OPUS or OPUS LAP funding agreement shall be entered into;
4. the project shall be carried out pursuant to the funding agreement and Regulations on the implementation of research projects, fellowships and scholarships. In the case of OPUS LAP proposals, research projects must be performed by the Polish and foreign research teams according to the rules of the NCN and respective partner institutions.

In the event of a breach of the call procedure or other formal infringements, the applicant may appeal against the decision of the NCN Director with the Committee of Appeals of the NCN Council. The appeal shall be lodged within 14 days of the effective delivery of the decision.

Please read the rules according to which personal data is processed by the NCN. In the case of OPUS LAP proposals, the following partner institutions are joint controllers of personal data:

• FWF: https://www.fwf.ac.at/en/privacy-policy/;
• GAČR: https://gacr.cz/en/legislation/;
• ARRS: http://www.arrs.si/sl/index.asp;
• DFG: https://www.dfg.de/en/service/privacy_policy/;
• SNSF: http://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/allg_reglement_16_e.pdf; http://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/Annex_I_Ausfuehrungsreglement_Beitragsreglement_E.pdf.