The European Research Council (ERC) was established in 2007. The ERC awards grants from the European Union budget to support excellent science in all fields. The ERC does not support networks or international consortia, but individual Principal Investigators (PIs) and their research teams.
The investigator can be of any nationality, but the chosen host institution must be located in an EU Member State or in a country associated to the EU Framework Programme. The only evaluation criterion is scientific excellence - both of the project proposal and of the investigator. This requires, in addition to previous achievements in the field, that the researchers come up with a completely new and revolutionary idea that is not a mere continuation of their previous achievements, which can significantly influence the field, push its boundaries or open new research perspectives.
Under the ERC, grants are awarded from the European Union budget, which have various rules on dissemination of project results and open access. The conditions can be checked in the list of grants and their open access rules. In general, open access is mandatory for those grants that have the Article 29 in the contract or tender documents (DISSEMINATION OF RESULTS - OPEN ACCESS - VISIBILITY OF EU FUNDING). It also addresses access to research data. In cases when open access is not mandatory, the ERC strongly recommends it.
The ERC has issued guidelines on implementation of open access, as well as the Open Research Data and Data Management Plans document, which is intended to help grant recipients manage research data.
The pages were prepared using information retrieved from the website of the Charles University Open Science Support Centre.
