The European Commission announced, on Tuesday 11 August, the winners of its call for expressions of interest launched last May (see EUROPE 12490/9) in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The European Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, welcomed an “excellent response” to this call. Twenty-three projects - involving 347 research teams from 40 countries, including 34 participants from 16 non-EU Member States - have been selected to receive a total of €128.2 million in funding under Horizon 2020.
The Commission will now concentrate on negotiating grant agreements with individual beneficiaries. “Although funding is conditional on a final Commission decision and the signature of the Horizon 2020 Grant Agreement, the research teams can already start their work”, the institution said in a statement.
A large majority of these funds (€55.2 million) will be allocated to projects aimed at developing more effective virus protection, care and detection systems. €28 million will also be devoted to analysing the responses to the epidemic, notably by governments and public health agencies.
For a list of the 23 selected projects and details of funding: https://bit.ly/2Qo0MaR
A manifesto for more transparency
In addition, at the end of July, the Commission published a manifesto to the beneficiaries of EU research grants. It thus intends to “maximise the accessibility of research results in the fight against Covid-19”.
If the research teams mentioned here subscribe to this manifesto, they will, for example, have to make their scientific articles, data and results public and accessible without delay, and they could grant non-exclusive and royalty-free licences to the intellectual property resulting from their research.
See the manifesto: https://bit.ly/34xQlK0 (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)