Oproep 2022: FAIR IT Innovatiefonds voor onderzoek (gesloten)

Application period: 15th November 2022 – 13th January 2023

The FAIR Research IT program at Utrecht University has the ambition that every research team is well supported in the field of Research IT. Structurally and on a large scale, with an emphasis on repeatability, so that knowledge and solutions previously sought out or developed can be easily re-used by others than the original developer. The solutions should adhere to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and open science principles.

The FAIR Research IT Innovation Fund is one of the instruments to realize that ambition. An example is research that contributes to the Research IT infrastructure.  

Who can apply?

Employees at Utrecht University, that is, researchers as well as research support employees.

How can you apply?

The application period has closed.

Your funding amount request 

The fund makes a distinction between small and medium projects. You can apply for a small grant of € 25.000, which is to be granted ten times.  Or you can apply for a larger grant of € 50.000 which is to be granted 5 times. The procedure you need to follow and the evaluation procedure, will be the same as follows.

Entry requirements 

These entry requirements for your proposal are mandatory: 

• The applicant participates in the project team.

• The proposal is not to receive funding from other funders such as the Open Science Fund, Open Access Fund, the Public Engagement Seed Fund or any other fund.

• The requested amount is lower than 50k euro

• The requested amount cannot be used for hardware

Teams can request a contribution for a project that they think will bring the goal of the FAIR Research IT fund closer. In Concretisering FAIR Research IT programma – Programma aan de Universiteit Utrecht ter ondersteuning van onderzoeksteams (only in Dutch - for a machine translation you might use Google Translate for pdfs), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5778574 you can read about the ambition of the FAIR Research IT programme. The fund is based on the ideas in this programme.

You are invited to experiment with your projects on the development of “building blocks” that might fit in the field of Research IT.

Grant Criteria 

The most important criterium is the contribution of the proposal to the ambition of the program. Your proposal can contribute to specific software, data management, collaboration, integration, compute capacity, knowledge, competence development or organizational enhancements of Research IT. 

The other criteria are the context of your proposal, plan and budget.

Projects start within half a year after your proposal has been granted, with a maximum running time of 12 months.

How will the granted proposal be selected? 

First selection will be based on the entry requirements on the application form. Secondly, a panel of independent Research IT specialists will review the proposals and rate the proposals. In this process, the evaluators may contact each other to get a better understanding of the approach.  

The FAIR Research IT Advisory Committee will discuss the proposal of the evaluators. The Committee will acknowledge the resulting grants and may add the next promising proposal for a grant if a budget can be made available. Final budget approval will be done by the Program Board.

Applicants will be notified on 1st March 2023.  Post-grant correspondence is not possible.  

Reporting 

If the proposal is granted, sometime in 2023 the program manager will ask the applicant to make sure that any building blocks you have developed are integrated in the infrastructure for FAIR Research IT before your project ends (even when they did not do what you expected them to do). You will be asked to share your lessons learned in the FAIR Research IT Program.

Selected projects will be connected to the FAIR Research IT Program via a liaison to align on possible data and software consultancy and research engineering from RDM Support. Their project members will also be invited to an evaluation session and intermediate sharing of results. The granted projects will be featured on the websites. We strongly encourage sharing your experiences in various communities, meetings or conferences.

Contact 

If you are considering an application and you have any questions, please send an email to: FAIRResearchIT@uu.nl

Recurring

This call is the first in a sequence of multiple calls for the coming years. Every year, researchers and research supporters can submit a proposal through this Innovation Fund. The next calls will be published here as well. 

Open Science Fund

To help teams integrate open science in their work, the Open Science Fund offers grants. The Open Science Fund application period is from 14 November 2022 - 18 Jan 2023. You'll find more information here.