TL;DR: COST Actions, the Seal of Excellence, and Open Research Europe are three separate EU research instruments that sit alongside — not inside — Horizon Europe’s headline grant competitions. COST Actions fund networking, not research: they pay for meetings, training schools, and short exchanges so researchers across countries can build a shared agenda, and they are unusually open to early-career participation. The Seal of Excellence is not funding at all; it is a quality label attached to a proposal that scored above a funding threshold but missed out on budget, which some national and regional funders will honour without a second review. Open Research Europe is the Commission’s own open-access publishing venue, primarily for Horizon Europe/Euratom-funded authors, built around open (not anonymous) peer review. This guide covers what each one actually is, who can use it, and how they connect. For the flagship programme itself, see Horizon Europe and EU Research Funding: An Overview.
Why these three belong on one page
None of these instruments is a Horizon Europe research grant, and none of them competes for space with ERC, MSCA, or EIC funding decisions covered elsewhere on this site. They share a different commonality: each is a real, usable EU-level instrument for researchers who are not the PI on a headline Horizon grant application — someone joining a collaborative network, someone whose strong proposal didn’t get funded, or someone deciding where to publish an EU-funded paper. Search interest in each is real but modest, and each is small enough that a standalone page invites thin content; together they form one coherent answer to “what EU-level options exist besides applying for a large Horizon Europe grant.”
| Instrument | What it is | Who it’s for | What it provides |
|---|---|---|---|
| COST Action | A funded, EU-supported research and innovation network under the COST Association (partly financed through Horizon Europe) | Groups of researchers across countries who want to build a shared research agenda; open to individual researchers who want to join an existing network | Funding for networking activities — meetings, training schools, short-term scientific missions, dissemination — not direct research costs |
| Seal of Excellence | A quality label awarded by the European Commission to a proposal that passed all evaluation thresholds but wasn’t funded due to budget limits | Applicants to specific Horizon Europe schemes (EIC Accelerator/Transition, MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships/COFUND, Teaming, ERC Proof of Concept, and the Climate Adaptation Mission) whose proposal scored highly but missed the funding cut-off | No money directly — a certified quality signal that some national, regional, or private funders accept in place of running their own full evaluation |
| Open Research Europe | The European Commission’s own open-access publishing platform, built on open peer review | Authors on Horizon 2020/Horizon Europe/Euratom grants, and (per the platform’s expanded eligibility) researchers affiliated with institutions in countries whose funders have joined the ORE Consortium | A free-to-publish (no author-facing fee), fee-free-to-read venue that satisfies Horizon Europe’s open-access publication requirements |
COST Actions: networking money, not research money
The single most misunderstood thing about a COST Action is what it actually pays for. A COST Action does not fund experiments, salaries, equipment, or the underlying research itself — it funds the coordination layer around research that’s already happening (or about to happen) elsewhere, through other grants. In practice that means COST Action budgets cover things like management-committee meetings, training schools, short-term scientific missions (funded visits to another participating institution), workshops, conference grants, and dissemination activities. The logic is that Actions build shared standards, protocols, and networks across borders that individual national grants can’t fund on their own, and those networks then go on to compete for research funding — COST itself reports that a meaningful share of Actions lead to follow-up funding proposals.
A COST Action runs for a fixed four-year term, is organised around interdisciplinary Working Groups under a Management Committee, and is open to participants from academia, industry (including SMEs), public bodies, and civil-society organisations across all fields of science and technology — COST does not fund a fixed list of thematic priorities the way many other EU instruments do; topics are proposed bottom-up by the research community itself.
Joining an existing Action vs. proposing a new one
These are two very different commitments, and most researchers looking at COST for the first time want the first one, not the second:
- Joining an existing Action is open throughout the Action’s four-year lifetime, not just at kickoff. Entry points include applying to attend a training school or short-term scientific mission, contacting a Working Group leader to join that group’s activities, or — for a more formal role — being nominated to a Management Committee (each COST member country and cooperating/partner state can nominate up to two representatives per Action). There is no separate application/evaluation process to simply join an ongoing network’s activities the way there is for a Horizon Europe grant.
- Proposing a new Action means submitting to COST’s Open Call, which runs on its own annual submission and evaluation cycle, independent of any Horizon Europe call deadline. A successful proposal becomes a new four-year Action with its own Management Committee.
Eligibility, including non-COST-country participation
COST membership currently spans the EU member states plus a wider set of European and neighbouring countries under the COST Association, with additional cooperating and partner arrangements (for example, Israel participates as a Cooperating Member and South Africa as a Partner Member). Researchers based outside the COST membership can still take part in Action activities in many cases, though reimbursement of their costs is more restricted than for participants based in member countries — COST’s own eligibility checker is the authoritative way to confirm reimbursement status for a specific country and role before committing time to an application.
Why COST is unusually accessible to early-career researchers
Compared with a competitive Horizon Europe grant, the entry barrier to a COST Action is low: there is no need to be a named PI, hold an existing grant, or write a competitive proposal to participate in most Action activities. Training schools and short-term scientific missions are specifically structured as career-development opportunities, and COST actively tracks and reports on early-career participation and gender balance across its portfolio as part of its inclusiveness policy. For a doctoral researcher or postdoc without their own funding, joining a Working Group or applying for a training school is often the most realistic way to get direct EU-level international collaboration experience.
Seal of Excellence: a quality label, not a grant
The Seal of Excellence is a certification, not money. It is awarded automatically by the European Commission when a proposal to certain Horizon Europe schemes clears every evaluation threshold — meaning independent expert reviewers judged it fundable on quality — but the scheme’s budget ran out before it could be funded. As of the 2021–2027 Horizon Europe programme, the Commission awards the Seal under a defined set of schemes: EIC Accelerator and EIC Transition, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships and COFUND, Teaming, ERC Proof of Concept, and the Horizon Europe Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change. For MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships specifically, the Seal has historically been awarded to proposals scoring at or above 85% overall that go unfunded for budget reasons alone (this threshold is set per call and should be reconfirmed against the current MSCA Work Programme before relying on it for a specific application round).
What a Seal of Excellence holder can actually do with it
This is the practical question behind almost every search for the term, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on your country and funder. The Seal itself carries no automatic funding entitlement anywhere. What it does is let a national, regional, or occasionally private funder skip re-running a full competitive peer review, because the Commission’s own evaluation has already certified the proposal met a funding-worthy quality bar. Whether any given funder chooses to honour that certification — and whether they offer full, partial, or no alternative funding to Seal holders — is a decision made independently by each funder, not by the Commission. In practice this means:
- Some national research councils and regional development funds (particularly those co-financing via the European Regional Development Fund) run dedicated Seal of Excellence follow-up funding lines, sometimes only for specific schemes such as MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships or EIC Accelerator.
- Some universities or regions offer bridge funding, top-up support, or preferential consideration in internal competitions to Seal holders, again on their own initiative.
- Many funders do not have any Seal-specific mechanism at all, in which case the Seal functions mainly as a strong credential to cite in an ordinary funding application elsewhere.
Because coverage changes and is genuinely inconsistent across countries and schemes, the only reliable way to find out is to check directly: the European Commission maintains scheme-by-scheme listings of national and regional funding opportunities linked from its Seal of Excellence pages, and a Horizon Europe National Contact Point (see our guide to the NCP network) can confirm current national arrangements. Confirm eligibility and the current list of participating funders directly before assuming a given country offers Seal of Excellence follow-on funding.
Open Research Europe: the Commission’s own publishing venue
Open Research Europe (ORE) is a European Commission-backed, open-access publishing platform launched in 2021, originally under Horizon 2020/Horizon Europe funding, built specifically so that Commission-funded research could be published openly without the article-processing charges that a conventional open-access journal typically bills to authors or their institutions. Eligibility was initially restricted to researchers named on a Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe (including Euratom) grant agreement; ORE has since expanded that eligibility to researchers affiliated with institutions based in countries whose national research funders have joined the ORE Consortium, broadening access beyond direct Horizon Europe grantees. Confirm current author eligibility directly on the platform before submitting, since consortium membership and eligibility rules can change.
ORE accepts a range of article types beyond the standard research article — including reviews, case studies, and data notes — spanning natural sciences, medicine, engineering, and the social sciences and humanities, reflecting the breadth of Horizon Europe funding itself rather than a single-discipline scope.
The open peer review model
ORE does not gate publication behind peer review the way a conventional journal does. Articles are published first, after an editorial and integrity check, and then go through open peer review afterward — reviewer reports and reviewer identities are published openly alongside the article, rather than kept anonymous and confidential as in traditional pre-publication review. Each article carries a visible review status (such as “approved” or “approved with reservations”) that updates as reviews come in, so readers can see both the article and the full record of how it was evaluated. This is sometimes described as a “publish, review, curate” model, distinct from the pre-publication, typically anonymous review used by most subscription and traditional open-access journals.
How it interacts with Horizon Europe open-access obligations
Horizon Europe grant agreements require immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications arising from funded work, with no embargo permitted, under Article 39 of the Model Grant Agreement (see our dictionary entry on Article 39). Publishing on ORE is one straightforward way to satisfy that obligation directly, since the platform was built around the same requirement it serves: immediate, fee-free open access with no embargo period, plus open licensing and open peer review that goes beyond what Article 39 strictly requires. Publishing on ORE is not the only way to comply with Article 39 — deposit in a repository or publication in another compliant open-access venue also satisfies it — but it removes the article-processing-charge question entirely for eligible authors, since ORE does not charge authors to publish.
Frequently asked questions
Does a COST Action pay for my research directly?
No. COST Action funding covers networking and coordination activities — meetings, training schools, short-term scientific missions, dissemination — not the underlying research costs, salaries, or equipment. Researchers typically fund the actual research through separate national, institutional, or other EU grants, and use the Action to coordinate and disseminate that work internationally.
Can I join a COST Action without being an experienced PI?
Yes. Most Action activities — Working Group participation, training schools, short-term scientific missions — are open to researchers at any career stage, and COST specifically promotes early-career and gender-balanced participation. You do not need to hold your own grant or be a named investigator to take part.
Does a Seal of Excellence guarantee funding?
No. It certifies that your proposal met the quality threshold for funding but missed out for budget reasons. Whether it converts into actual funding depends entirely on whether a national, regional, or other funder in your country has chosen to honour Seal of Excellence certifications — check directly, since this varies by country and by scheme.
Do I have to be funded by Horizon Europe to publish on Open Research Europe?
Originally, yes — eligibility was limited to Horizon 2020/Horizon Europe (including Euratom) grantees. ORE has since extended eligibility to researchers at institutions in countries whose national funders have joined the ORE Consortium, so check current eligibility rules directly before assuming you either do or don’t qualify.
Is ORE peer review anonymous?
No. ORE uses open peer review: reports and reviewer identities are published alongside the article after publication, rather than the anonymous, pre-publication model used by most conventional journals.
Last verified 2026-08-16 against cost.eu, the European Commission’s Seal of Excellence pages, and Open Research Europe’s own materials. Eligibility rules, quality thresholds, and the list of national funders honouring the Seal of Excellence change periodically — confirm current details directly with COST, your Horizon Europe National Contact Point, and Open Research Europe before relying on specifics for an active application or submission.
