In the News

The Scheme

The European Collaborative Research Projects (ECRP) scheme was established to promote investigator-driven, multinational collaborative research in the social sciences in Europe and beyond. ECRP operates in the responsive-mode and its annual Call for Proposals is open to applications in all fields of the social sciences. The scheme offers opportunities to test innovative ideas, pool expertise and strengthen research capacity in line with the objectives of the European Research Area. Researchers may collaborate across participating countries on any subject which demonstrates a need for international cooperation, while the funding remains at a national level.

ECRP has a one-stage application procedure and a two-stage international peer review process coordinated by ESF which sets a high quality benchmark for the funded proposals. The Call for Proposals is published in January each year. Projects are generally supported for three to five years, depending on national rules, and some centralised funding is provided by the national funding organisations to support additional dissemination and capacity-building activities once the projects are running.

Rationale

The enlargement of the European Union and European Research Area has brought greater awareness of the importance and value, but also of the difficulty, of working with counterparts from diverse research cultures, with often heterogeneous research agendas, funding systems and operational procedures. New opportunities for mutual learning and cooperation have opened up across national and disciplinary borders, both for researchers and research councils. It is, however, a challenge to ensure that multilateral collaborative research produces synergy and added value in circumstances where the cultural values of researchers may influence their scientific approaches and interpretations of findings. European support is therefore essential to bring to bear a wider range of cultural and disciplinary perspectives on topics of common concern within a global research environment and to promote the exchange of information, datasets and methods.

In response to these challenges, the ECRP scheme has a dual aim: first, to promote high quality responsive-mode international collaborative research in the social sciences by offering support to cover salaries, equipment, consumables and access to infrastructures; second, to provide a platform for research councils to work together to develop common procedures for applications, peer reviewing and monitoring, while retaining final funding decisions at the national level. Proposals submitted under the scheme are competing – directly and indirectly – for funds alongside projects submitted to national schemes.

The ECRP scheme does not impose specific research themes for several reasons: first, valuable research can be carried out in areas not identified for priority funding; second, the social sciences encompass a wide range of heterogeneous disciplines and fields of study, making it impossible to identify priority topics that do not exclude many sectors of the social science research community; third, research councils in the social sciences operate predominantly in the responsive mode, and researchers are accustomed to taking the lead in identifying and proposing new directions. International collaborative research in the responsive mode is widely believed by social scientists to produce the greatest added value, and the responsiveness of the ECRP scheme is considered by scientists and research councils alike to be its greatest attraction.