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Applicant Guidelines


What is on offer?

 

EOSC-Life brings together 13 Life Science research infrastructures (LS RIs) to create an open collaborative space for digital biology. The aim of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to enable ground-breaking research, and to generate new knowledge by linking the life science community to a variety of interdisciplinary data resources and a platform of data analysis tools. Publishing or re-using FAIR data resources and running workflows in the cloud is becoming increasingly important for researchers. EOSC-Life is offering training, advice and assistance from data experts, tool developers and cloud specialists, alongside financial support for projects, to enable life science researchers to connect their research to the cloud.

The WP3 Internal call for Industry collaborations is addressed specifically to those partners of the EOSC-Life consortium (existing beneficiaries and third parties listed explicitly in the Grant Agreement) who wish to implement a project in collaboration with a company, either small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or larger industry. Projects should demonstrate the innovation potential of open, FAIR, cloud-based data resources and support the creation of new business models based on open data. The call will provide funding for academic members of the project team as well as access to technical expertise and training from the EOSC-Life consortium to enable the delivery of complex cloud-connected life science research projects.

Funding allocated to the project team can only contribute to the salary costs of experts working on the project at an academic institution that is already a partner in the EOSC-Life consortium. Companies or other members of the project team external to the consortium can only receive reimbursement for travel and consumables costs. We expect to provide up to 70,000 €/project for direct personnel costs. Applicants will be expected to provide a budget within the application form. Successful applicants are able to obtain additional funding to support running their workflows or analysis activities on a cloud provider. Any further details to access this funding resource can be found contacting the Cloud deployment and resources experts from WP7. Some additional technical expertise may also be available to support your cloud deployment alongside your own technical experts.

Co-funding of projects with own resources or in-kind contributions are possible. In case of co-funding or in-kind contributions, information should be provided in the budget section of the proposal to allow reviewers to assess the feasibility of the proposal. A maximum of 1-2 projects will be funded in this internal call.

 

What projects are eligible?

Applications must fall under one or more of the 13 Life Science domains represented by the EOSC-Life consortium and address one or more of the following themes:

  • Data curation, handling and integration for publishing into the cloud (WP1)
  • Tool interoperability, workflows and containerization (WP2)
  • Cloud deployment and resources (WP7)

The project must present a life-science use-case, and contribute to and/or take advantage of cloud-based data and analysis. The objective of this call is to make data and/or workflows available to the EOSC and the scientific community that are of relevance both to academia as well as private companies. Data and workflows should be available at the point of application and should not be generated from scratch.

Proposals in one or more of the following categories would be in scope:

  • Sharing of workflows and toolboxes for data pre-processing, sharing and searching
  • Cloud-compatible solutions for collection, processing, standardisation, FAIRification, and storage of existing data of different varieties, for example in microbiology, pathology, chemoinformatics, drugs and clinical data, via EOSC
  • Algorithmic approaches to generating data sets within the life sciences
  • Integration of existing data sets and repositories across life science fields or within individual research communities
  • Migration of existing workflows into the cloud, adapting these to FAIR data standards and integrating multiple workflows
  • Metadata generation and use, including automation projects

Not in scope are projects aiming to generate new data sets, development of entire new workflows or software solutions, projects only involving data curation, projects without scientific use cases or those developing cloud tools without open access.

In cases where applicants are lacking access to suitable datasets for tool or workflow development and testing, they are encouraged to make use of publicly available datasets from data repositories, e.g., Image Data Repository (IDR), GenBank, Eukaryotic Pathogen Database Resources (EuPathDB).

Proposals need to clearly demonstrate the mutual benefits to academic and industrial collaborators and the contribution of the company to the conceptions and implementation of the project. Companies need to confirm their willingness to participate in the proposal by submitting a Letter of Support.

To complete the mandatory consultation with the experts, applicants should use the “Contact Experts” button to be assigned EOSC-Life experts for each applicable area relevant to their project. For details on this process, see the Maturation phase description below. This contact should be made as early as possible before submitting their proposal to allow sufficient time for consultations with the experts. Deadline for new consultation requests is 5pm CEST on 28 July 2021. Consultations can be carried out up until the submission deadline on 29 September 2021. However, we strongly urge you to schedule and conclude your expert consultation early to ensure that all questions regarding your proposal can be properly addressed. Our technical experts reserve the right to offer only limited consultation in the final two weeks prior to submission if the number of consultation requests exceeds capacity.

 

Who is eligible?


Please note that only EOSC-Life partners (beneficiaries and third parties explicitly named in the Grant Agreement) together with a collaboration partner from industry or an SME are eligible to apply.
Budget will be assigned to the applicant(s) according to the budget allocation in the proposal from the budget in WP3 reserved for this call. Project team members external to the EOSC-Life consortium will not be eligible to directly receive a budget for the implementation of the project. They can receive reimbursement of travel and consumables costs through the main applicant institution that is a member of the consortium.

 

Maturation phase


Before submitting a proposal, you must contact our technical experts to either discuss the type of support you are requesting in one or more of the areas of expertise listed above, or, if you are not requesting technical support from EOSC-Life and providing the expertise in-house, to discuss your proposed project. You can get in touch with our experts via the “Contact Expert” button in the first step of the application. To expedite the assignment of the most qualified EOSC-Life expert, please provide answers to the questions in the maturation phase questionnaire when making first contact. One or more experts will then be assigned to your proposal under development to discuss your requirements and align these with the available resources, bring in technical perspectives, and provide feedback on the proposal to help you to refine your application. The completion of this short questionnaire will help us assign the right expert to your proposal.
If you yourself are a member of a work package addressed in the proposal (1/2/7), a different technical expert will be assigned to your proposal during this maturation phase. The data shared during the maturation phase and in the proposal submission will be treated as confidential.

We advise you to make contact with the experts at the earliest opportunity to ensure there is sufficient time for consultation and to refine your proposal. Deadline for new consultation requests is 5 pm CEST 28 July 2021. Consultations can be carried out up until the submission deadline, but the extend of consultation services might be limited during the final two weeks prior to submission due to the volume of requests.

After the consultation with the EOSC-Life experts your proposal needs to be submitted in ARIA (https://instruct-eric.eu/submit-proposal/?t=eosclifeindustry) before the final call deadline 5pm CEST 29 September 2021.

 

Assessment criteria

 

Proposal assessment will be split into two stages:

  1. Technical feasibility and maturity assessment performed by technical experts within the EOSC-Life consortium
  2. Scientific excellence and impact assessment performed by external scientific experts

To be accepted as an EOSC-Life Internal call for Industry collaborations funded project, the proposal must pass both stages.

Experts will be looking for projects which demonstrate:

  • Scientific excellence and impact
  • Potential to make available new valuable resources (data/services/methods) within the EOSC and for the scientific communities represented by the Life Science Research Infrastructures.
  • Close collaboration between industry and academia in the conception and implementation of the project as well as mutual benefits and impact on both communities
  • Feasibility of the project within the EOSC-Life runtime (the project must be completed and reported before February 2023 and start within 2 months after project acceptance).
  • Availability of resources within the project team: people power, computational & financial resources.
  • Availability of resources within the EOSC-Life technical expert teams: if EOSC-Life expert support is required in your project, please contact the relevant experts before submitting your project application to ensure that the requested assistance is available.
  • Sustainability after the end of EOSC-Life. Projects should have a clear plan for their sustainability beyond the duration of the funding period (e.g.: data/software/project output management plan). No extended funding beyond the project duration will be available via EOSC-Life and it falls within the applicant's responsibility to plan for long term sustainability of their proposed work.

EOSC-Life strives to represent the broad spectrum of life science communities and to promote gender balance and pan-European research. For proposals that score above the threshold for excellence at both assessment stages, considerations for the final selection of projects will include both the scientific excellence and technical feasibility of each proposal and the balance of scientific domain, geography and gender across all of the awarded projects.

Projects should be expected to run for approximately 10-12 months, start shortly after project acceptance and be completed no later than 31 Dec 2022. Independent of this, all project work and reporting must be completed before February 2023 to receive funding. Find details on the reporting guidelines for funded projects here. Projects should strive for close cooperation with life science research infrastructures (RIs) (https://www.eosc-life.eu/about/about-european-ris/) and the topic must be of relevance for life science RIs. Applications involving several life science domains are preferred as they help to improve interoperability across scientific disciplines.

In the spirit of Open Science and FAIR data, successful projects are expected to have a lasting impact and provide sustainable outcomes to enable future projects to benefit from their work and re-use their data, tools and workflows. Projects should present novelty for the EOSC, and address important challenges and needs of the biological and biomedical community.

For more information on our assessment processes please see the reviewer guidelines and the technical evaluation guidelines.

 

Deadline for submissions


The deadline for submissions will be 5pm CET Wednesday 29 September 2021. Only submissions received in full before this deadline will be considered for acceptance.
Additionally, applicants must have made first contact with technical experts before 5pm CET 28 July 2021 in each of the areas relevant to their application before submission. See “Maturation phase” for more information.

 

Terms and conditions


By applying to this call you must agree to be bound by the Internal call for Industry collaborations Terms of submission and agree that your personal data can be processed according to the Internal call for Industry collaborations privacy policy

 


FAQ

If you have questions regarding the Internal Call for Industry collaborations and the application process, check our FAQ.
If you don’t find the answers you are looking for, contact opencall@eosc-life.eu to submit your query and we will get back to you as soon as possible.