5. Jul 2016

COST – a Programme to Support Excellence and Inclusiveness

Klaus Schuch, scientific director of ZSI, recently published under the MIRRIS project a policy brief on how COST can be approaced and employed by researchers from the so called Inclusiveness Target Countries, which basically include all EU13 countries targeted by MIRRIS (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) to prepare and increase participation in European RTI networks and projects.

The particular value of COST for researchers from these target countries is caused by three main rationales:

1. Programmatic rationale: COST contributes actively to the ‘Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation’ goal of HORIZON 2020 with a strong focus on the so called COST Inclusiveness Target Countries (ITC). The ITC include all EU-13 countries mentioned above.
2. Budget rationale: Budgets are often regarded as the evidence of how important a political or programmatic proclamation really is. In this case, the importance for EU-13 is justified by the mere fact that half of COST’s total budget should be of direct benefit to the ITC. Given the low overall number of researchers in these countries compared to the other COST member states, this requires a huge effort to be more beneficial to researchers from ITC countries in order to reach this budget target.
3. Affirmative selection: Only – and really only – for proposals for COST Actions which are ranked in between those projects which will be for sure funded and those projects which will for sure not be funded, i.e. the so called grey zone where not enough money is available to fund all projects ranked with the same marking by the external independent reviewers, the Scientific Committee usually favours proposals with a high share of partners, especially in leading positions, from ITC, among other considerations.

The whole policy brief can be downloaded from here.

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