The European Commission has signalled that it will launch a host of calls for proposals – mainly related to the Cooperation specific Programme – “at the end of July". FRENZ has been led to believe that the calls will be launched on 27th (30th for ICT) July with deadlines ranging from October 2009 to January 2010, depending on the call area.

Researchers in New Zealand hoping to get involved with collaborative projects in the following themes should see either the FRENZ or CORDIS website for call details: Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnology; Environment; Health; Energy; Nanosciences, ICT, etc.

Information events will be held for each theme by FRENZ in the coming weeks and months. Further information on training will be available from the FRENZ website.

No further information.

At a recent National Contact Points meeting, the European Commission announced that 178 proposals had been received for the March 2009 deadline of the International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) programme. One proposal was ineligible.

In the 177 eligible proposals:

• 1026 organisations were involved
• all but 7 of the 39 Member and Associated States were represented
• all but three of the 29 eligible third countries were represented
• the total budget requested from the EC was €45 million, for a budget of €30 million.
• the top five European countries, in terms of numbers of participations in proposals, were the UK (83), Italy (69), Spain (59), France (58) and Germany (55)
• the top five non-European "Third countries", in terms of numbers of participations in proposals, the US (69), China (66), Brazil (55), Russia (36) and Australia (31) NZ had 13 participations, putting it in 14th place among the 29 third countries

Proposals were received to all panels, with Engineering and Life Sciences receiving the most - 40 and 38 respectively - and Economic Sciences receiving least, with only 4 proposals. It was interesting to note that the Chemistry, Environment and Social Sciences panels received similar levels of participation, with 21, 20 and 19 proposals each.

The EC noted that these figures indicate a significant increase in participation, with respect to the first call, in 2008.

No further information.

The FRENZ Director, Carole Glynn, will offer a series of training and information sessions on various FP7 issues, including Marie Curie Fellowships proposal writing, and helping researcher managers develop strategies to increase FP7 participation in-house. In addition, online sessions will be offered to provide a forum for researchers interested in the cooperation calls expected at the end of July 2009.

New events will be added in the coming months, according to demand, including:

• An introduction to FP7, and
• FP7 project management: administration, finance and reporting

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On the 15 June 2009, the European Commission made the decision not to reduce the 60% Transitional Indirect rate for calls closing after 31 December 2009. At the launch of FP7, it was foreseen that a 60% transitional rate for indirect cost reimbursement would be offered until 2009, by which time it was expected that Universities (the main beneficiary using the rate) would be in a position to move to an actual indirect costs rate.

Unfortunately, the expected progress toward actual indirect costs has not been made, and so the EC has agreed to continue with the higher level transitional rate for the time being. Currently, around 84% of Universities still use flat rates, rather than an actual overhead rate.

A FP7 Progress Report has been prepared, by the European Commission, for the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, to deliver their view of the progress made under the Seventh European Framework Programme for Research. Accompanying the document is a Commission staff working document (yet to be adopted) which provides the following hints for the future:

• Option to use Lump Sums for travel and subsistence costs should be introduced with the 2010 work programmes.
• FP7 aims to have average reporting and payment periods of 18 months (was 12 months in FP6)
• Main sources of errors in the costs claimed by beneficiaries relate to the personnel costs and indirect costs.
• A Web based tool for FP7 Scientific Reporting is being created on the back of the FP7 Financial Reporting tool.

To download this report, please click here and scroll down to:
FP7 Progress Report (waiting to be adopted). (from page 12)

Idealist eChallenge Activities

Pre-Conference Brokerage - Face2Face meeting and eChallenge e-2009 Conference Exhibition

Ideal-ist, the worldwide ICT support network, to which FRENZ is associated, is organising an international Brokerage Event in relation to Call 6 in association with eChallenges e-2009 on Tuesday 20 October in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Event targets a wide spectrum of companies and researchers from Europe interested in sharing new project ideas and finding collaboration partners.

It will also be THE opportunity to present at international level your project ideas for 6th Call for Applicants and to promote your organisation at international forum.

eChallenges delegates can already indicate that they wish to participate !

The event is focused on Call 6 of ICT work programme 2009 - 2010, expected to be launched in November 2009 with an April 2010 deadline.

• Objective ICT-2009.2.1.Cognitive Systems and Robotics

• Objective ICT-2009.4.1.Digital libraries Digital Preservation

• Objective: ICT 2009.5.3 Virtual Physiological Human

• Objective: ICT 2009.6.2 ICT for Mobility of the Future

Online registration for the Ideal-ist Pre-Conference Brokerage - Face2Face meeting will be open by end of July. Please find more information here.

The eChallenges e-2009 Conference takes place in the Marmara Hotel, Istanbul 21-23 October 2009. This is the nineteenth in a series of Annual Conferences supported by the European Commission, which regularly attracts over 650 delegates from leading commercial, government and research organisations around the world to share knowledge and experience, lessons learnt and good practice in the areas of ICT for Networked Enterprise & RFID, eGovernment & eDemocracy, eHealth, Collaborative Working Environments, Living Labs, eInfrastructures;Technology Enhanced Learning and ICT Skills, Knowledge and Content Technologies, Security and Identity Management, High Performance Computing - Applications and Mobility.

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Further information on Ideal-IST at www.ideal-ist.net

The ICT call 5 expected to be launched on 31 July deadline has been shifted from 3 November to 26 October 2009, meaning researchers have one week less to prepare proposals.

Following the recent experience of DG Information Society (INFSO) in handling the entire evaluation of ICT Call 4 (with remote reading and scoring of proposals at the individual stage), the EC believes that that the original timetable for ICT Call 5, originally closing on 3rd November, would make it impossible to complete the evaluation of Call 5 (with remote reading) before Christmas.

Since it is not possible to move the evaluation into January or February, DG INFSO has announced that they are obliged to advance the closing date for ICT call 5 to 17h00 Brussels time on Monday 26th October. This date will of course be highlighted on the call page and in the Guides for applicants, and in the revised ICT workprogramme 2009-2010.

No further information.

DG Information Society (INFSO) has added a new objective to ICT Call 5, Objective ICT-2009.9.5: Supplements to strengthen cooperation in ICT R&D in an enlarged European Union.

This new objective offers coordinators of ongoing ICT research projects (IP or STREP) which finish after the 31st March 2011 the opportunity to add one or more new partners to their project to expand its activities in or into the enlarged European Union. The March 2011 date requirement is to ensure that the project still has a reasonable time to run for the participation of the new consortium members.

Coordinators of qualifying ICT projects have been approached by DG INFSO to invite them to provide their project information, in order to populate a new database on CORDIS.

NZ researchers involved in existing projects might use this mechanism to further develop relationships with researchers in Europe.

No further information.

The Swedish presidency of the Council of the European Union began on 1 July and will continue to the end of 2009. In addition to handling the problems of economy, employment and climate change, the work programme stresses research innovation as well as improving the governance of the European Research Area (ERA).

The vision of the ERA is to improve European competitiveness in science and technology by facilitating researcher mobility, improving their access to world-class infrastructures, opening up European, national and regional research programmes, and strengthening global research partnerships. The presidency plans to continue the work that has begun on the ERA, and to 'propose governance mechanisms for the effective use of these resources and better cooperation between policy areas'.

The Swedish EU presidency coincides with a review of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Ensuring that the direction of forthcoming programmes for research and development is best positioned to respond to future challenges in health, energy and climate is another of the presidency's goals.

The role of research and innovation in helping to lift Europe out of the current economic crisis is highlighted in the Swedish work programme, which points out that 'research and innovation create new development areas'.

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The Research Executive Agency (REA) has been granted more power. The EC formally announced the REA administrative and operational autonomy on 15 June. The REA is the largest of the EU executive agencies and is expected to have a staff of 558 by 2013. It will be responsible for the implementation of around 12 per cent (EUR 6.5 billion) of the FP7 budget. The REA has been set up to manage projects during FP7, and is expected to exist until 2017.

The REA has responsibility for the implementation of specific parts of FP7: the Marie Curie Actions under the FP7 People Specific Programme; Research for the benefit of SMEs under the FP7 Capacities Specific Programme; and the Space and Security themes under the FP7 Co-operation Specific Programme.

All new FP7 Grant Agreements for these areas will be issued by the REA rather than the EC.

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At a recent information day in Brussels, the EC explained some fundamental changes to the way in which it would approach funding socio-economic sciences and humanities in the 2010 theme-specific Work Programme. Future funding will be strongly policy driven, with major societal ‘challenges’ which can only be addressed through sustained research effort identified. Calls under these challenges will ask for projects with a minimum EC contribution of €6.5 million, up to a maximum of €8 million. The EC will expect to fund projects which are likely to have a broad European impact, and they should thus include a minimum of ten partners from ten different member states. It is also hoped that projects funded will be interdisciplinary in nature, conduct foresight activities to identify future directions for research, and to take an innovative approach to the dissemination of outputs.

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The EC has launched a new Health Portal focussing on FP7 funded research in the area of health. It includes websites devoted to Health Biotechnology, Genomics and Systems Biology, Medical Research, Infectious Diseases, Public Health and Innovative Medicines. Each of these is broken down into sub-topics, under which it is possible to find information on the objectives of the EC in each area, open calls, contacts, and ongoing projects. There is also an e-library from which EC publications on health can be downloaded.

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The European Commission's Erasmus Mundus programme has just awarded almost 10,000 new grants in the academic year 2009-2010. 8,385 students and academics will come to study or teach in Europe, and 1,561 Europeans will spend time at partner institutions in countries outside Europe. Erasmus Mundus is a co-operation and mobility programme in the field of higher education that aims to enhance the quality of European higher education and to promote dialogue and understanding between people and cultures through co-operation with countries outside the European Union.

More New Zealand students and scholars are enjoying study, teaching and research opportunities in the European Union thanks to the Erasmus Mundus programme.   For the 2009/2010 academic year, eight New Zealand students and three New Zealand scholars have been selected to participate in the Erasmus Mundus Scheme. Students have been awarded more than NZ$43,200 per academic year for a maximum of two years, and scholars have been awarded more than NZ$26,700 for a maximum period of three months.

Ján Figel', the European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, said "Erasmus Mundus is going from strength to strength. In the years since 2004, when it began, the programme has been able to establish itself as one of the world's foremost international mobility programmes. With its emphasis on quality and excellence, it is doing an outstanding job of promoting European higher education on the world stage."

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy said: "Education plays a crucial role in the development of countries and for providing younger generations with perspectives. By promoting academic exchanges between Europe and the rest of the world we are giving university students the means to better shape their own futures and to understand and respect each other.  Erasmus Mundus is, therefore, a precious instrument to build and strengthen bridges across the world."

(Source: Delegation EC to New Zealand, Newsletter 237, Issue Date: 03/07/2009)

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Scientists at Plant & Food Research have received funding to encourage science collaboration with Spanish and Italian researchers. The main aim of the research is to develop understanding of apple colour development in high temperature environments, such as Southern Europe.

The research programme has received a total of NZ$126,000 under the European Commission's new Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) programme in conjunction with the New Zealand Government. The funding will allow scientists from Plant & Food Research, Spain's Institut de Recerca I Technologia Agroalimentaries (IRTA) and Italy's Fundazione Edmund Mach - Istituto Agrarie San Michele all' Adige (FEM-IASMA) Research Centre to travel between the three institutions for extended periods of time to further existing apple breeding and genomics research collaborations.

Under the scheme, IRSES is providing funding to cover costs for scientists from the two European institutes to travel to New Zealand, and the New Zealand Ministry for Research Science and Technology funds Plant & Food Research scientists' travel to Europe.

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Dr Di McCarthy, CEO of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and Dr Martin Grabert, COST Office Director, signed a new reciprocal agreement on 5 June 2009 in Brussels. This means COST Actions involving partner institutions from New Zealand can continue to apply for special funding to collaborate in common fields of research.

This scheme has been tested over the past two years and is proving to be a big success. Two years after the launch of the reciprocal agreement, 26 COST Actions are benefiting from New Zealand participation.Delighted about the results so far, Dr Grabert explained that: “the continuation of this very successful instrument is an important and encouraging signal for COST and its role in a globally-open European Research Area.”

COST Action members have strongly benefited from results obtained by almost all of New Zealand’s Crown Research institutes and universities, as well as some private institutions. Exchanges have been undertaken mainly in food and agriculture, forestry, biotechnology and materials science.

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Joint Technology Initiatives

Joint Technology Initiatives (Annex IV-SP1) Calls: FCH-JU-2009-1

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Research across Europe

Are you interested in learning more about the research activities in your area? Click on the different countries on the map to discover FP7 at work.

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Energy - Euratom FP7 Research & Training Projects brochure

This brochure provides an outline of the first batch of nuclear research and training activities funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Atomic Energy Community.

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