CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: horizon europe draft work programme 2026

  • Horizon Europe Calls 2026: Deadlines & OA Rules

    Horizon Europe calls 2026 run across the EU’s €14 billion 2026-2027 Work Programme, published by the European Commission on 11 December 2025 and searchable on the Funding & Tenders Portal. Pre-award teams should track submission status and cluster deadlines on the Portal, then verify each call’s specific open access and data-sharing conditions before drafting a proposal.

    The Horizon Europe Funding & Tenders Portal is the European Commission’s single official system for publishing, filtering and submitting proposals to every Horizon Europe call for proposals.

    What Is the Horizon Europe 2026-2027 Work Programme?

    The European Commission adopted the Horizon Europe 2026-2027 Work Programme on 11 December 2025, releasing over €14 billion in funding opportunities across the programme’s final two-year cycle, according to UK Research Office (UKRO) and Innovate UK Business Connect reporting on the publication. This is the last work programme under the current 2021-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework.

    The European Research Council (ERC) and European Innovation Council (EIC) published their 2026 work programmes separately and earlier in the cycle. Pre-award offices tracking “all open calls” therefore need to check the main Work Programme package and these two standalone documents together, not the main package alone.

    • Horizontal activities, including a new €540 million call supporting the Clean Industrial Deal and AI in Science
    • Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) postdoctoral, doctoral network and staff exchange strands
    • Six thematic Clusters: Health; Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society; Civil Security for Society; Digital, Industry and Space; Climate, Energy and Mobility; and Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment
    • Five EU Missions: Adaptation to Climate Change, Cancer, Restore our Ocean and Waters, Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, and Soils

    How Do You Track Open Horizon Europe Calls in 2026?

    The EU Funding & Tenders Portal is the single official source for every Horizon Europe call; institutions should treat it, not third-party digests or mailing lists, as the system of record for deadlines and eligibility rules. Portal searches can be filtered and saved so that new topics matching an institution’s research areas trigger an automatic alert.

    An effective pre-award tracking routine has four steps:

    1. Filter the Portal’s “Search Funding & Tenders” screen by programme (Horizon Europe), submission status (“Forthcoming” or “Open for submission”), and programme part or cluster.
    2. Save the search and register for email notifications so new topics appear automatically rather than being missed between manual checks.
    3. Cross-check each topic’s call identifier (for example HORIZON-MSCA-2026-PF-01) against the relevant cluster or actions Work Programme PDF for full scope and evaluation criteria.
    4. Log the topic’s submission deadline, type of action (RIA, IA, CSA or COFUND), and open science conditions in the institution’s internal pipeline before allocating proposal-writing resources.

    National Contact Points add a second layer of verification: UK applicants, for example, can confirm topic scope and competitiveness with UKRI’s National Contact Point team before committing resources to a full proposal.

    What Are the Key Horizon Europe 2026 Call Deadlines?

    Most single-stage calls that opened in early 2026 close in September or October 2026, though Clusters 1, 4, 5 and 6 include topics with earlier or later cut-offs, according to Innovate UK Business Connect’s analysis of the published Work Programme. Pre-award teams should check each cluster individually rather than assume a single portfolio-wide deadline.

    Call Reference Deadline
    MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026 HORIZON-MSCA-2026-PF-01 9 September 2026
    MSCA Doctoral Networks 2026 HORIZON-MSCA-2026-DN-01 24 November 2026
    ERC Proof of Concept 2026 ERC-2026-POC 17 September 2026
    Restore our Ocean and Waters Mission calls Mission-specific topics 23 September 2026
    EU Space Research (Cluster 4, HaDEA-managed) Cluster 4 topics 2026 call, €90.97 million budget

    These dates illustrate the spread across strands rather than an exhaustive list. Every topic carries its own deadline on the Portal, and multi-stage calls add an earlier outline-proposal cut-off before the full submission date.

    What Open Access and Data-Sharing Obligations Apply Before You Submit?

    Every Horizon Europe grant agreement carries mandatory open science obligations that sit alongside the topic-specific scientific requirements, and reviewers assess a proposal’s data management approach as part of the excellence criterion. Confirming these terms before submission avoids a compliance gap that would otherwise surface only at the grant agreement stage.

    Three obligations apply to essentially every Horizon Europe-funded output:

    • Immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications, with no embargo period, deposited in a trusted repository and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or an equivalent licence.
    • A Data Management Plan (DMP) as a mandatory deliverable, with a first version due within six months of the project start and updated as data-generation plans evolve.
    • FAIR data handling — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable — applied under the principle of “as open as possible, as closed as necessary,” with closure permitted only for justified reasons such as intellectual property, personal data or security.

    Individual calls layer additional conditions on top of these baseline rules. A Cluster 1 (Health) topic handling clinical data, for example, carries stricter personal-data provisions than a Cluster 4 digital-infrastructure topic. Call-specific conditions are published in the topic’s own annex, not just the general Work Programme introduction, so pre-award teams must read both documents before finalising the proposal’s data management section.

    For terminology used across these obligations — contributor roles, persistent identifiers, licensing terms — the CASRAI Dictionary provides standards-aligned definitions that research administration teams can cite directly in DMPs and internal guidance.

    Common Questions About Horizon Europe Calls 2026

    Where can I find the official list of open Horizon Europe calls for 2026?

    The EU Funding & Tenders Portal is the European Commission’s official system listing every open, forthcoming and closed Horizon Europe call. Filter by programme, submission status and cluster, then save the search to receive automatic email alerts when new matching topics are published.

    How much funding is available in the Horizon Europe 2026-2027 work programme?

    The Commission made over €14 billion available across the 2026-2027 Work Programme, published 11 December 2025, covering MSCA, Research Infrastructures, the six thematic Clusters, the five Missions, and horizontal strands such as the Clean Industrial Deal call.

    Do Horizon Europe grants require open access to publications?

    Yes. Horizon Europe requires immediate open access with no embargo for all peer-reviewed publications, deposited in a trusted repository under a CC BY licence or equivalent, with open metadata describing the funding and licensing terms.

    What is a Data Management Plan and when is it due?

    A Data Management Plan (DMP) sets out how a project will generate, document, share and preserve research data under FAIR principles. It is a mandatory Horizon Europe deliverable, with a first version due within six months of the project start date.

    Implications for Pre-Award Teams

    Treating call-tracking and open science compliance as two separate workflows creates risk: a proposal can clear the Portal’s deadline filter yet still fail a topic’s data-sharing conditions during grant preparation. Pre-award offices get better outcomes by building a single checklist that logs the deadline, the type of action, and the open access and DMP conditions from the same read-through of the topic text.

    The 2026-2027 Work Programme is the final cycle before the next Multiannual Financial Framework, so institutions should expect the Commission to keep tightening open science verification at the reporting stage rather than relax it. Early, consistent DMP practice now reduces rework at grant signature. Research administration teams building this capability can align proposal, compliance and reporting language using the CASRAI research administration resources.

  • Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027 Guide: Open Access and FAIR Data Changes

    Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027 keeps the core open science mandate intact — immediate open access, FAIR data and a Data Management Plan for every project that produces data — while cutting call topics by 35%, expanding lump-sum funding to roughly half of all calls, and introducing new cross-cluster “horizontal calls”. For grant offices, the compliance clauses have not moved; the surrounding administrative machinery has.

    The Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027 is the European Commission’s final two-year implementation plan for the 2021-2027 Horizon Europe framework, published in December 2025 and covering all funding calls, budgets and eligibility rules through the end of the programme.

    What changed in the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027?

    The European Commission adopted the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027 on 12 December 2025, according to the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA). The Commission committed over €14 billion across the 2026 and 2027 calls, spanning all three Pillars, the Missions, Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area (WIDERA), and the New European Bauhaus Facility, as confirmed by Innovate UK Business Connect’s summary of the published documents.

    The headline structural change is scale: the Commission’s General Introduction to the 2026-2027 Work Programme states that the number of topics across Pillar 2’s collaborative research Clusters was cut by 35% compared with the 2023-2024 Work Programme, a reduction also reported independently by Science|Business and EMDESK. Fewer, broader topics replace the previous highly prescriptive call texts.

    Dimension Work Programme 2023-2025 Work Programme 2026-2027
    Pillar 2 call topics Baseline count 35% fewer topics
    Lump-sum funding share Partial, growing Approx. 50% of all calls
    Open access mandate Immediate OA, CC BY, no embargo Unchanged
    FAIR data / DMP requirement Mandatory; “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” Unchanged; EOSC integration reinforced
    Cross-cluster “horizontal calls” Not used Introduced (e.g. Clean Industrial Deal, AI in science)
    Committed budget signalled — Over €14 billion

    Open access to publications: what’s the same, what’s different

    Nothing has changed in the core publication mandate. Under the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement, beneficiaries must ensure immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications reporting funded results, with no embargo period, deposit in a trusted repository, and a licence — typically Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or equivalent — that permits reuse, redistribution and text and data mining.

    What grant offices should actually re-check is the supporting metadata clause, not the licence clause. The 2026-2027 General Annexes continue to require full bibliographic metadata and persistent identifiers (DOI, ORCID iD, ROR) on every deposited publication. Institutions that let repository metadata quality slip during the 2023-2025 cycle should treat the new Work Programme as a trigger to re-audit templates, not assume automatic carry-over.

    • Confirm the trusted-repository and CC BY licence clause wording in your institutional agreement template matches the 2026-2027 General Annexes text
    • Update publication-metadata forms to capture DOI, ORCID iD and ROR identifiers consistently
    • Re-brief researchers that “no embargo” still means no embargo, even for monographs and long-form outputs
    • Flag any project bidding into a new horizontal call for additional cross-cluster reporting fields

    FAIR data, Data Management Plans and the EOSC push

    The FAIR data obligation is also unchanged in substance: research data generated or collected under a funded grant must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, and every applicable project must maintain a Data Management Plan (DMP) that is created early and updated across the project lifecycle. The principle “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” continues to govern the balance between openness and legitimate restriction — intellectual property, personal data and security exceptions still apply, but even restricted datasets must carry FAIR, openly accessible metadata.

    What is new is emphasis, not obligation. Work Programme documentation for the Missions strand explicitly references infrastructures “federated under the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)”, and the 2026-2027 cycle leans further into EOSC as the delivery mechanism for FAIR compliance — pushing project consortia towards EOSC-compatible repositories and machine-actionable metadata rather than institution-specific solutions. Grant offices whose DMP templates still point researchers to generic “any FAIR repository” language should update guidance to name EOSC-aligned options explicitly.

    Structured contributor metadata is part of the same compliance chain: publications reporting Horizon Europe-funded work increasingly carry standardised role disclosures. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, and the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 — grant offices building publication-metadata checklists can treat CRediT-style role tagging as a practical way to strengthen the bibliographic metadata clause without waiting for a funder mandate to force it.

    Structural and procedural changes that affect compliance workflows

    Three procedural shifts in the 2026-2027 Work Programme indirectly affect how open science obligations get delivered, even though the obligations themselves are stable.

    • Lump-sum funding expansion. EMDESK’s analysis, citing Science|Business reporting on the final Work Programme text, puts lump-sum funding at roughly 50% of all 2026-2027 calls — up sharply from the partial rollout in 2023-2025. Lump-sum grants change how compliance is verified, since cost reporting is replaced by milestone and deliverable verification, which shifts open-access and DMP checks toward deliverable sign-off rather than cost-claim audit.
    • Horizontal calls. New cross-cluster calls address themes such as the Clean Industrial Deal and AI in science, spanning multiple Clusters within Pillar 2. These calls typically generate larger, more heterogeneous datasets, making FAIR data planning and interoperable metadata schemas more operationally important than under single-Cluster calls.
    • Broader, less prescriptive topics. With 35% fewer topics, each call description covers more ground, meaning the same open-access and data clauses now apply across a wider range of project types per topic — grant offices should not assume a topic’s compliance profile is self-evident from a shorter call text.

    Grant office FAQs and what happens next

    When did the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027 take effect?

    The European Commission adopted the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027 on 12 December 2025, per HaDEA’s official announcement, opening the programme’s final two-year cycle. Most single-stage call deadlines fall in September or October 2026, though some Clusters open earlier, with deadlines in March or April 2026.

    Is open access still mandatory under Horizon Europe 2026-2027?

    Yes. The 2026-2027 Work Programme retains the immediate open access mandate for peer-reviewed publications: no embargo, deposit in a trusted repository, a CC BY (or equivalent) licence, and complete bibliographic metadata with persistent identifiers. Grant offices should verify these clauses remain unchanged in institutional agreement templates.

    What is the FAIR data requirement in Horizon Europe 2026-2027?

    FAIR data means research data must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, with a Data Management Plan required for projects that generate or collect data. “As open as possible, as closed as necessary” continues to apply, and metadata must remain FAIR even when underlying data is restricted.

    How many fewer call topics are there in the 2026-2027 Work Programme?

    According to the Commission’s General Introduction, Pillar 2’s collaborative research Clusters saw a 35% reduction in the number of topics compared with the 2023-2024 Work Programme, consolidating funding into broader, less prescriptive topic descriptions.

    None of this changes the substance of what a research office signs up to when it accepts Horizon Europe funding: immediate open access, FAIR-managed data, and a live Data Management Plan remain non-negotiable. What has changed is the operating environment around those obligations — fewer but broader topics, half of all calls running on lump sums, and new cross-cluster calls that will generate messier, larger datasets than before. Institutions that treat the 2026-2027 Work Programme as a compliance-template refresh, not just a new set of calls to bid into, will spend less time firefighting metadata and DMP queries once projects are underway.