More than € 93 M for researchers and international teams

The National Science Centre has opened the 12^th edition of its calls for proposals: OPUS, PRELUDIUM and SONATA, with an aggregate budget of ca € 79 M. Researchers will also have the additional opportunity of applying for grants under two international programmes: the second edition of the BEETHOVEN call for Polish-German projects, and the third edition of the POLONEZ funding opportunity for incoming researchers. Towards international cooperation the Centre has committed ca € 14.4 M.

POLONEZ 3 is a call for proposals that enables researchers from foreign institutions to come to Poland for a research stay of one to two years. Eligible applicants are researchers with a doctoral degree or at least 4 years of full-time research experience, who in the past 3 years have not worked or studied in Poland for more than 12 months. The call is financed under the Horizon 2020 EU Programme for Research and Innovation. The present edition has a budget of ca € 7.2 M.

The bilateral BEETHOVEN 2 call will see changes in comparison to its first edition. In that previous edition, Polish-German research teams carrying out projects in the domain of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences were eligible to apply. This time funding has been secured also for the representatives of selected disciplines within the domain of Physical Sciences and Engineering. The budget of this call, organised jointly with Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), totals ca € 7.2 M.

The first edition of this funding opportunity enjoyed considerable success and allowed for the financing of 17 Polish-German research teams. Now we want to broaden the programme’s scope as we also accept projects in Physical Sciences whilst nearly tripling the budget.  I hope that in the years to come BEETHOVEN will also include other research disciplines, said professor Zbigniew Błocki, director of the National Science Centre. Germany is Poland’s important economic partner, as well as a country of many excellent research centres. Creating conditions for an ever more intensive knowledge exchange with this country seems a natural direction for the development of international operations within the Centre.

In addition to the two international competitions, a call for proposals has been published under three Polish funding schemes, each of them being launched for the twelfth time.

OPUS is the most popular of the NCN funding schemes, addressed to a large group of participants. Applications are open to all researchers regardless of their years of research experience or degree held. The funding received can be directed toward building a research team and the purchase of research equipment. The total sum of funding has been set at nearly € 60 M.

Researchers who begin their academic career, before receiving their doctorate degree, can apply for funding under the PRELUDIUM call. For doctoral candidates, it offers the chance to carry out one's first independent research project. In the twelfth edition of PRELUDIUM, the Centre has adopted a budget of € 7.2 M

SONATA is also a funding opportunity addressed to researchers at the early stages of research activity, although somewhat more experienced. Under this scheme, submissions will be accepted from researchers with a doctorate degree held no longer than 7 years before applying for the grant, i.e. in the years 2009-2016. The pool of funding comes close to € 12 M.

Proposals should be submitted using the OSF electronic submission system (https://osf.opi.org.pl) by 15^th December 2016. The results of OPUS 12, SONATA 12, PRELUDIUM 12 and POLONEZ 3 will be announced by June 2017, while the publication of the results in BEETHOVEN 2 is expected in October 2017.