This report presents an overview of the organisation and management processes that have guided the implementation of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project ‘Protecting the Right to Culture of Persons with Disabilities and Enhancing Cultural Diversity through European Union Law: Exploring New Paths – DANCING’. It describes the internal procedures adopted by the Principal Investigator (PI), Prof. Delia Ferri, supported by the Project Manager, Ms Hilary Hooks, and the DANCING team to ensure academic excellence of scholarly outputs, high-quality standards of non-peer reviewed outputs, ethical compliance, inclusive practices and appropriate communication strategies throughout the project lifecycle.

DANCING comprises four different Work Packages (WP). Three of them are related to the key objectives of the project (experiential, normative and theoretical), while the fourth focuses on translating the research into practical tools that can effect societal change. As with all ERC projects, DANCING is curiosity-driven research but has endeavoured to display a societal and policy impact and to support the enhancement of disability rights in Europe. DANCING adopts a socio-legal perspective, i.e. pursues an analysis of law that is directly linked to the social situation to which the law applies. Consistent with this perspective, in order to achieve the three objectives indicated above, it combines legal doctrinal research, qualitative research and arts-based research.

All WPs were deployed, organised and led by the PI, within the framework of an efficient project management carried out by the Project Manager, who supported the PI in overseeing the workflow and timelines. The DANCING project complied with best practices in relation to authorship and internal review processes. All scholarly outputs are published in peer-reviewed outlets (either academic journals with a high impact factor or volumes published by reputable publishers). Non peer-reviewed outputs, such as blog posts, were subject to a quality check by the PI and reviewed by another member of the team and/or by other colleagues in the School of Law and Criminology or in the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute. Besides internal checks, reports were also subject to an informal peer review by colleagues in the School of Law and Criminology acting as ‘critical friends’.

DANCING complied with European principles and rules in terms of acknowledgments, open science/data, and milestone verification. As discussed in previous reports, DANCING also committed to and abided by ethical research practices, including informed consent, data protection, and the anonymisation of sensitive data. Data collection and archiving has been carried out in line with the DANCING project’s ERC Data Management Plan (DMP) (Ferri, 2021), which lays out the project’s data management approach, consistent with the ERC commitment to Open Science, including Open Access (OA) for research publications and Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) data principles (ERC, 2019). DANCING published its academic outputs and deliverables opting for Gold OA, and, only when such option was not available, for Green OA using trusted repositories, such as the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). All reports were published on Zenodo, which is a reputed open access repository, developed as part of the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe OpenAIRE ecosystem. Zenodo ensures long-term preservation, provides a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and has clear usage conditions and licensing under Creative Commons licenses. All outputs are also stored on the Maynooth University (MU) institutional repository (MURAL).

DANCING has also aligned with the values of diversity and inclusion, which inform the project itself, with specific attention to inclusive communication and accessibility.