Winning Grants with Open Science & RRI

Horizon EU commit firmly to the practices of "Open Science" and "Responsible Research & Innovation", but the level of awareness among the average grant applicant lags significantly behind. Average applicant tends to address these new requirements as a "check list", while making them essential philosophy of the research method design can add a competitive edge at proposal evaluation.

The presentation will showcase two parallel experiment at Un. Lille (France) and Technical University Denmark (DTU), targeting different national and EU grant calls, and research cultures.

At both sites, the approach was to pro-actively integrate Open Science in national and EU grant proposals, in order to test if going above and beyond funder requirements on Open Science could give applicants a competitive edge.

Strategies and advocacy was developed to integrate Open Science in all proposal sections: from adding excellence to a reproducible research methodology, to enhancing impact & exploitation in synergy with intellectual property (IP) practices, and broadening dissemination and communication with Citizen Scientists.

Approaches included designing specific Open Science actions and deliverables, as part of the research process, accompanied by appropriate budget that matches ambition, and capitalizes on institutional capacity to implement Open Science.

Evidence from multi-annual reiterations clearly demonstrates that Open Science, when credibly coupled to pro-active knowledge transfer strategies and Citizen Science/Science Literacy outreach activities, clearly adds a competitive advantage to research grant proposals. The lessons learned are generic, discipline-agnostic to a large degree and potentially easily transferable to any national funding research grant instrument (or research support team).

As European Commission steps up the discourse on societal challenges relevance of access to publicly-funded research (e.g. Manifesto for EU COVID-19 Research https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/research-area/health-research-and-innovation/coronavirus-research-and-innovation/covid-research-manifesto_en), research support staff can be a key multiplier in Open Science uptake across all research disciplines.

Learning Outcomes:

Attendees will:
- appreciate that Open Science is much broader than the prevalent "Open Access to publications" debate;
- learn how Open Science provokes positive proposal evaluations in all sections of a proposal;
- learn how to support applicants to integrate Open Science in every proposal.