In the first quarter of 2024 the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) will launch the MAPS call. The programme will provide funding for projects carried out by Polish researchers in collaboration with partners from Switzerland, as well as Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary and Romania.

MAPS is a multilateral initiative that promotes knowledge circulation by providing cross-border collaboration opportunities. The programme aims at increasing the competitiveness in the European Research Area and responds to the scientific community’s demand for more international integration and cooperation with colleagues based in Switzerland as well as Central Europe.

MAPS is a part of the second Swiss contribution to selected EU member states. The programme is operated by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) which cooperates with research funders in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.

Joint Research Projects

MAPS will be implemented through joint research projects involving at least one applicant based in Switzerland and two to five additional applicants from two to five of the participating EU-13 countries. Each project is carried out at the research facilities available at the institutions which join the research consortium, while reciprocal visits and short stays may also be supported. An online partner search tool was made available to support partnership formation (link: https://roch.brokerage.uefiscdi-direct.ro/)  

The maximum amount of funding for each team in each country is 350,000 francs for four years. All costs of the Polish part of the project are covered by SNSF. The call is not co-funded by NCN or other Polish institutions.

The research projects have a duration of between 36 and 48 months.

The call for proposals will be open to all research areas.

Eligibility

The project must be submitted by a Swiss applicant in the SNSF’s electronic submission system mySNF. It is not necessary to submit the application in the OSF system. Merit based and financial details concerning the Polish side of the partnership must be completed by the Swiss PI in mySNF.

The Polish Principal Investigators must meet the following criteria:

• have obtained their PhD at least 4 years prior to the submission deadline;
• be scientifically independent researchers and be able to lead the project team;
• be employed under an employment contract at an eligible research institution for the duration of the whole project, giving them access to the relevant research infrastructure.

The Polish Principal Investigator must be employed under an employment contract throughout the duration of the project in a Polish institution. Enterprises are ineligible as applicants.

The call is scheduled to open in the first quarter of 2024. Further information will follow in due course.

On 5 March 2024, M-ERA.NET will launch a new call for international research projects addressing materials research and innovation to support the European Green Deal and Sustainable Development Goals.

For more information on the call, please go to the website of the M-ERA.NET programme.

This preannouncement is for your information only. The terms of the call will be laid down in the call text.

Prof. Joanna Golińska-Pilarek, Chair of the NCN Committee for Regulations and Procedures, discusses the most important mechanisms of the NCN, including its call procedure, expert evaluation process, reviews and final assessments, in an article just published in “Forum Akademickie”.

Prof. Joanna Golińska-Pilarek, photo: Piotr Szałański/NCN Prof. Joanna Golińska-Pilarek has sat on the NCN Council since 2018. In her article, she explains selected mechanisms at play in our agency, with a special emphasis on the proposal review procedure. She also discusses some of the postulates raised by the research community with respect to changes in the operation of the NCN and debunks several public misconceptions.

As for expert review, prof. Golińska-Pilarek explains how teams charged with proposal assessment are appointed and why, when resubmitted, a proposal may get a completely different score even if it has been modified in line with the suggestions of previous reviewers:

“(Expert) Teams are set up independently for each call. Of course, some experts may be appointed under (no more than three) consecutive calls. However, we do our utmost to change team composition regularly, if only to make sure our experts are a good match for the subject matter of the proposals submitted to each call. Another important reason is that we want to make sure proposals that were rejected previously are not evaluated by the same people once again. And, lastly, some experts simply refuse to join our team in successive calls. The annual statistics are really impressive: in 2022 alone, we appointed 2,100 experts and reviews were prepared by more than 11,000 external reviewers.

It is important to keep in mind that a proposal is evaluated against other proposals submitted under the same call. There is no institutional memory at play here. Experts do not have access to any proposals submitted in earlier iterations. As a matter of principle, they are also not informed whether or not the proposal is submitted for the first time. When resubmitted, the proposal is usually evaluated by different people than before and the final decision is taken by a different team. The pool of proposals against which it needs to compete is also completely different. This is why the final assessment may differ widely from the original one, and sometimes may be more negative, even if the proposal has been modified in line with the suggestions provided by reviewers in an earlier iteration of the call.”

The article also explains whether additional assessment criteria may be added and how applicants can appeal against a negative funding decision.

We are launching the MINIATURA 8 call, in which PhD holders can vie for grants to fund single research activities. The budget of this year’s call is 20 million zlotys.

The call is open to proposals for single research activities that have never been funded by the NCN or any other institution before. They may involve preliminary/pilot studies, library and archive research, fellowships, research visits and/or consultations. An important change this year is that applicants may include more than one of these forms, as long as they can justify and prove this is necessary for them to complete the activity and achieve their objectives. The activity may be planned over up to 12 months and its budget must fall between 5,000 and 50,000 zlotys.

The call is targeted at researchers who wish to conduct basic research and carry out a single research activity to prepare a research proposal they intend to submit under NCN calls or other national or international calls in the future.

Applicants must hold a PhD degree, awarded no earlier than 1 January 2012.  The eligibility period may be extended to account for a childcare leave or a career break due to incapacity to work. Applicants must demonstrate at least one paper published or one artistic achievement or achievement in research in art. They need to have a valid, full-time employment contract at their institution on the day the proposal is submitted. Their research record must not include any previous NCN grants in which they have acted as PIs or held scholarships/fellowships under ETIUDA, FUGA, and UWERTURA. Any single applicant can be awarded a MINIATURA grant only once.

Proposals will be accepted via the OSF system until 4 pm (CEST) on 31 July 2024.

Call procedure and peer review

MINIATURA differs from other NCN calls in terms of proposal intake and assessment. Proposals will be accepted from the beginning of February until the end of July; they will be passed forward to reviewers on a rolling basis and new results will be announced every month.

It is important to remember that the call budget (PLN 20 million) is divided proportionally so that the same pool of resources is available each month. Accordingly, researchers are encouraged not to put off their decision to apply until the very last month to make sure their proposal is not rejected only because of insufficient funds left over for that month.

Intake may be suspended when the total amount of resources requested by applicants is more than double the budget of the call, i.e. more than 40 million zlotys.

Proposals will undergo a merit-based evaluation by an expert team appointed by the NCN Council for the purposes of MINIATURA 8. The evaluation procedure consists of just one stage; for each proposal, experts draw up three independent assessments based on predefined criteria. The final decision for any single proposal will be issued within five months of its submission.

43 projects worth a total of nearly 26 million zlotys will be funded under the fifth PRELUDIUM BIS call.

PRELUDIUM BIS 5 is targeted at doctoral schools; its objective is to support the education of PhD students and fund research projects they carry out as part of their doctoral dissertations. The call also promotes international mobility, as each grant holder is required to complete a foreign fellowship of 3 to 6 months, which is funded by the National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA).

Under a PRELUDIUM BIS project, the research supervisor is the PI and the PhD students are chosen in an open call procedure. In this edition, the NCN waived the requirement for the PhD student working on the grant to earn their PhD as a condition for final project completion.

PRELUDIUM BIS projects may be planned over 36 or 48 months. PhD students are paid monthly scholarships of PLN 5,000 until the midterm assessment, after which the sum is increased to PLN 6,000 per month. The budget of the project may go toward funding the PI’s salary, materials and small equipment, outsourcing, business trips, visits, consultations, and compensation for collective investigators.

The fifth PRELUDIUM BIS call attracted 229 proposals with a total budget of more than 134 million zlotys, out of which the NCN selected 43, worth a total of nearly 26 million, for a final success rate of 18.78%.

Quality of life in the modern world in PRELUDIUM BIS grants

Some of the projects recommended for funding in this round address the factors and phenomena that affect our world today and our quality of life.

In Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr hab. Katarzyna Andrejuk from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences will carry out a project in migration studies. Her project will centre on work offered via online platforms that publish e.g. offers of meal delivery or transport services, which has become increasingly important economically in recent years. As work of this kind is easily available and does not require any professional experience, it is often the first choice for refugees and economic migrants, or those who arrive in the country to pursue a degree or to reunite with their families and seek employment. Together with her PhD student, Andrejuk will look at the phenomenon from different angles; for instance, she will study how it affects the integration of immigrants into the host society.

In Physical Sciences and Engineering, funding will go to a project by Dr hab. Mikołaj Piniewski from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, devoted to elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and their impact on future hydrological projections. Across the globe, researchers simulate hydrological processes with the aid of models of varying complexity and rely on different factors to create future scenarios, but the issue of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and their impact on plant growth has not yet been adequately studied. Dr hab. Mikołaj Piniewski plans to carry out his modelling research in small river basins located in different climate zones.

In Life Sciences, Prof. Dr hab. inż. Ewa Kaczorek from the Poznań University of Technology will study the impact of microplastics on the biosphere. In recent years, we have been learning more and more about the dangers related to the presence of microplastics in our environment and their impact on animals and people. As emphasized by Kaczorek, microplastic particles do not occur in the environment on their own, but together with other contaminants. Particularly alarming are their interactions with antibiotics, which may potentially contribute to the development and spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARG). In her PRELUDIUM BIS project, Prof. Kaczorek will aim to describe the role of microplastics as carriers of antibiotic contaminants in the environment and determine the interaction between microplastic-related contaminants and environmental microorganisms.

Fellows of the Fulbright Senior Award programme, organised by the Polish-American Fulbright Committee, will now be able to continue working with their US colleagues after their return to Poland thanks to NCN funding, as per an agreement reached between the two institutions.

“We have created this joint programme to facilitate cooperation between researchers working in Poland and their colleagues in the United States”, said Dr Marcin Liana, Deputy NCN Director.

The framework agreement was signed in December last year. Under its terms, the NCN and the Fulbright Committee have agreed to launch joint initiatives to support research and international cooperation and work hand in hand to internationalise and promote Polish science. The first tangible product of the programme is the Fulbright Senior Award, scheduled to begin taking in proposals on 8 February 2024.

The Fulbright Senior Award programme allows researchers employed at Polish academic and research institutions to pursue independent research or research and teaching projects at US institutions. It is open to PhD holders at all career levels and from any discipline. They may spend from three to ten months at their host institution in the US.

The 2025/2026 academic year selection board will consist of experts appointed by the NCN; fellows will also be eligible to receive NCN funding to continue their research cooperation with their American peers once they return to Poland.

Research grants will go to ten researchers whose projects fall within the domain of basic research. Funding must be devoted to research activities directly related to the project. The grant can go toward funding, e.g. materials and small equipment, seminar fees and two-way travel costs for researchers involved in the research component.

It was the Fulbright Committee that came forward with the offer. “It can often be a challenge to maintain and develop Trans-Atlantic cooperation. Thanks to our programme with the NCN, many of our fellows will get the tools they need to continue working with their American partners”, stressed Justyna Janiszewska, Executive Director at the Polish-American Fulbright Committee.

The maximum budget the NCN has set aside for the programme is two million zlotys. Projects can take up to one year and a half from the moment the NCN signs a relevant agreement with the host institution. The maximum amount that can be awarded to any single project is 200 thousand zlotys.

“For the NCN, this programme is important, because it supports the international activities of Polish researchers. We already have projects with our American counterpart, i.e. the National Science Foundation, and the joint programme with the Fulbright Committee further reinforces our cooperation with the US”, added Dr Marcin Liana.

In 2024, join us for a new series of information webinars by NCN discipline coordinators, intended for researchers and PhD candidates planning to submit proposals under NCN calls.

The webinars will work as modules, each devoted to one of the following themes:

• the NCN call portfolio;
• the proposal review process;
• proposal structure;
• final report assessment;
• the MINIATURA submission process;
• the call portfolio (English version).

You can find more information about the themes, dates and registration deadlines for each webinar here:  Information webinars and training courses for applicants.

To take part, you need to register through Clickmeeting. A registration link will be made available as soon as the registration period starts; the exacts dates are listed online at Information webinars and training courses for applicants. The maximum number of participants is 500.

In cooperation with the CHIST-ERA network, the NCN  is launching an international call for proposals in information and communication technology.  The NCN Council has set aside 500 thousand euro in funding for Polish teams.

The CHIST-ERA Call 2023 is open to international consortia preparing research projects in the following areas:

1. Multidimensional Geographic Information Systems (MultiGIS)
2. Smart Contracts for Digital Transformation Ecosystems (SmartC)

The research consortium can consist of 3 to 6 research teams from at least three different participating countries: Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

Funding awarded under the CHIST-ERA Call 2023 can go toward covering the cost of research team salaries, salaries and scholarships for students and PhD candidates, research equipment and other necessary project expenses.

To apply for funding, the consortium must prepare and submit a joint proposal, which will undergo merit-based review by an international team of experts appointed jointly by the agencies that make up the CHIST-ERA network. The Polish team also needs to submit a domestic proposal; the NCN accepts proposals from teams working on basic research projects at Polish host institutions. The Polish PI needs to hold at least a PhD degree and the project can be planned over 24 or 36 months.

Joint proposals may be submitted until 10 April; the deadline for domestic proposals, submitted via the OSF system, is 17 April. Call results will be announced until October 2024 and projects can go ahead in December.

About CHIST-ERA

The NCN joined the CHIST-ERA consortium in 2013; since then, it has regularly supported Polish researchers in innovative, interdisciplinary research in information and communication technology. Call 2023 is the twelfth call in which it has participated. CHIST-ERA call winners thus far have included 23 projects conducted in cooperation with Polish researchers. In six of these, the Polish team coordinated the project as a whole.