The European Commission has just published calls in a number of areas. You'll find all open calls on the cordis website.

It will be our pleasure to support you upon the preparation of a proposal, feel free to contact us any time.

COST (European CO-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) is one of the longest-running European instruments supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe. COST is a framework allowing for coordination of nationally-funded research on a European level. The aim of COST is to establish and support international networks amongst scientists.

The Swiss State secretariat of education and research (SER) just published its annual report 2008 on Swiss participation in COST: This annual report gives details on COST Switzerland, COST at international level, the Swiss representation in various technical committees and Swiss participation in COST Actions.

To download this annual report and for further information on Swiss involvement in COST please refer to the SER website under "Dokumentation" and "Themen". For further information on how to participate in COST, please contact the cost office at SER.

This annual report gives an overview of the Swiss participation in FP7 up to 2008 in terms of thematic areas or participant types, success rates of project proposals as well as an international comparison of the Swiss participation.

The report is available on the SER website.

On the 15 June 2009, the Commission made the decision not to reduce the Transitional Indirect rate for calls closing after 31 December 2009. Instead the 60% rate will continue to be used. This is due to the fact that currently about 84% of Universities still use flat rates.

The Finance Helpdesk underlines that this statistic is worrying as it is clear that the vast majority of universities have not yet implemented an accounting system that would allow them to receive much higher funding via using actual indirect costs.

The Finance Helpdesk has been assisting Universities and Research Institutes across Europe in setting up their books correctly and advising on the best suited Indirect Costs Methodology.

They hope that organisations looking into upgrading their accounting systems will not now decide to halt and continue to use the 60% Transitional Indirect rate, when they could from our experience be due a much higher overhead rate.

The task of executive agencies is to manage specific activities which would normally have been carried out by the European Commission. The Research Executive Agency (REA) has its own legal personality, but is supervised and controlled by the European Commission.

The parts of FP7 that the REA manage are:
• The Marie-Curie Actions of the People Program.
• The SME-specific activities of the Capacities Program.
• A large part of the Space and the Security themes from the Cooperation Program.
• In addition, a major role of the REA is to provide and manage the evaluation facilities across the entire framework programme (except evaluation facilities for the Ideas Program, which is entirely managed by the European Research Council).

This means that in above areas your Project Officer will now be part of the executive agency and not the Commission.

More.