International call for proposals "ORA – Open Research Area for the social sciences"

ORA is an agreement between the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, France), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK) and the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, Netherlands).

In order to strengthen international co-operation in the field of social sciences, wishing to fund high quality scientific research within their own countries, and aware that some of the best research can be delivered by working with the best researchers internationally, ANR, DFG, ESRC and NWO are launching a fifth common call for proposals in order to fund the best joint research projects in the social sciences. The scheme will provide funding for integrated projects by researchers coming from at least two of the four participating countries, in any combination of two to four countries (excluding bilateral applications from French-German teams). The partner organisations will conduct a co-ordinated peer review and a single common selection process. Funding will be distributed among the partners according to the place of work of the researchers, and generally according to the funding rules of each individual agency.

Proposals may be submitted in any area of the social sciences. However, the disciplinary coverage may vary according to the involvement of the national agencies. Applicants who are uncertain of whether their proposal would be eligible should contact the relevant national agencies for clarification.

There is again a special opportunity for cooperation with projects in Japan: With the aim to strengthen cooperation between researchers in Japan and Europe, JSPS as the national funding organization of Japan has established a funding scheme to support projects which are associated with ORA. For details see page 3 of the Call text.

The ORA funding programme underwent an evaluation in 2016. Results of this evaluation can be found here: www.dfg.de/ora

Please note that the average success rate across the previous four calls was 10%. The available budgets of the funding agencies for this call will not change significantly.

For this call, a two stage procedure will be implemented. All applicants will receive a brief assessment of their Outline Proposal and a notification of the shortlisting decisions in November 2017. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to submit a Full Proposal.