CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: horizon europe work programme 2026-2027

  • 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.

  • Widening Participation in Horizon Europe: A Practical Guide for New Institutions

    Widening Participation is Horizon Europe’s dedicated equity mechanism, channelling funding through instruments such as Teaming, Twinning and ERA Chairs to 15 lower-performing “Widening countries” plus qualifying Associated Countries. Every project funded under these instruments — like every other Horizon Europe grant — is bound by the same immediate open access and FAIR data obligations, which means institutions with the least administrative capacity face the same compliance bar as long-established research offices.

    Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area (WIDERA) is Horizon Europe’s fourth “transversal” element, sitting alongside the programme’s three main pillars. Its purpose is definitional: WIDERA exists to close the research and innovation performance gap between EU member states, not to relax the rules that apply once funding is awarded.

    What is Widening Participation in Horizon Europe?

    Widening Participation and Spreading Excellence is the set of Horizon Europe actions that build research and innovation capacity in countries whose institutions have historically won a disproportionately small share of competitive EU funding. According to the European Commission’s Research and Innovation portal, Widening countries accounted for just 5.1% of the total Horizon 2020 budget as of February 2021 — up from 4.2% under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and 4.8% in 2018, a slow but measurable trend the current work programme is designed to accelerate.

    WIDERA is not a side grant scheme. It is a structural correction mechanism embedded in the same legal and reporting framework as every other Horizon Europe action, including its Open Science obligations.

    Which countries and instruments does Widening Participation cover?

    Under the Horizon Europe Regulation, the 15 Widening countries are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Associated Countries with equivalent research and innovation performance characteristics, plus the EU’s Outermost Regions, are also eligible. The UK is not a Widening country — but as a Horizon Europe Associated Country since 1 January 2024, UK-based institutions remain eligible as project partners in most Widening actions, even where only Widening-country institutions can act as coordinators.

    Three instruments do most of the equity-building work:

    Instrument Purpose Coordinator eligibility
    Teaming for Excellence Creates or modernises centres of excellence in Widening countries via strategic partnership with a leading institution abroad Widening-country institution, conditional on securing complementary structural-fund investment
    Twinning Links a Widening-country institution with at least two top-class counterparts in different EU or Associated Countries for networking and knowledge transfer Widening-country institution acts as coordinator
    ERA Chairs Attracts a high-level researcher to a Widening university or research centre and integrates a new research team into that institution Widening-country institution hosts the chair

    The 2026-2027 work programme adds further routes, including the European Excellence Initiative, Pathways to Synergies, the Dissemination and Exploitation Support Facility, the Hop-on Facility, Excellence Hubs and ERA Talents — each aimed at a different stage of institutional capacity-building.

    How do open access and open data requirements apply to Widening countries?

    Horizon Europe’s Open Science policy applies uniformly: there is no reduced-compliance track for Widening-country grantees. Every beneficiary must provide immediate open access to peer-reviewed publications, with no embargo period, deposited as a machine-readable copy in a trusted repository and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or an equivalent open licence.

    Research data falls under the same expectation of being findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR), consistent with the standards this site tracks elsewhere in its research-data vocabulary. The practical consequence for a widening-country institution is that open access compliance capacity — repository infrastructure, licensing know-how, data management planning — has to exist from day one of a grant, not be built up over a project’s lifetime.

    • No embargo is permitted on peer-reviewed outputs, regardless of an institution’s prior publishing infrastructure.
    • CC BY (or equivalent) licensing must be agreed before submission, not retrofitted after acceptance.
    • Data management plans are a deliverable, assessed on the same timetable as for established research-intensive universities.

    Building compliance capacity from scratch

    Institutions applying for Teaming, Twinning or ERA Chairs funding for the first time typically lack a dedicated open access office, an institutional repository, or staff experienced in Horizon Europe’s grant agreement terms. The European Commission has built dedicated support around exactly this gap rather than leaving it to individual institutions.

    Three support channels are worth prioritising early in a widening-country institution’s planning:

    • NCP_WIDERA.NET — the network of National Contact Points that provides free guidance on eligibility, proposal writing and reporting requirements specific to Widening actions.
    • The Dissemination and Exploitation Support Facility — free-of-charge expert support to help Widening-country beneficiaries meet dissemination obligations, including open access planning.
    • The Hop-on Facility — allows a Widening-country institution to join an already-running Horizon Europe Pillar 2 or EIC Pathfinder consortium, gaining compliance experience without having to coordinate a new proposal.

    For research administrators building this capability, mapping open science obligations against institutional workflow — who owns the repository deposit step, who signs off the data management plan, who tracks embargo-free publication dates — is the highest-leverage early task. Framing this against the broader discipline of research administration practice, rather than treating it as a one-off grant condition, is what allows the capacity to outlast any single Teaming or Twinning project.

    Widening Participation: frequently asked questions

    What are the widening countries in Horizon Europe?

    The 15 Widening countries defined in the Horizon Europe Regulation are Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Associated Countries with comparable research performance, and the EU’s Outermost Regions, are also eligible for Widening actions.

    Is the EUI Widening Europe Programme the same as Horizon Europe’s WIDERA?

    No. The European University Institute’s Widening Europe Programme is a separate, institution-level initiative supporting scholars from Widening countries. Horizon Europe’s WIDERA is the EU-wide funding mechanism behind Teaming, Twinning and ERA Chairs; the two are complementary but administratively distinct.

    What this means for the 2026-2027 work programme

    The European Commission published the WIDERA Work Programme 2026-2027 on 11 December 2025, confirming that Teaming, Twinning and ERA Chairs continue as core instruments alongside the newer capacity-building routes. For institutions in widening countries, the equity mandate and the open science mandate are not competing priorities — they are the same compliance obligation, assessed on the same grant agreement. Building repository infrastructure, licensing literacy and data management capability now, rather than reactively per project, is what determines whether a widening-country institution can convert a single Teaming or ERA Chairs award into a durable research administration function.

  • Horizon Europe Cluster 6 Work Programme 2026: Open Data Rules for Applicants

    The Horizon Europe Cluster 6 Work Programme 2026 requires every funded project to meet the standard Horizon Europe open-research-data baseline — a FAIR-compliant Data Management Plan and immediate open access to publications — plus a Cluster 6-only layer: biodiversity and genetic-resource data must go through recognised repositories, follow Darwin Core-style standards, and satisfy the EU’s Nagoya Protocol access-and-benefit-sharing rules. Research offices supporting Cluster 6 applicants need to track both layers separately, because the biodiversity-specific obligations do not appear in the general Horizon Europe Annotated Grant Agreement text that administrators may already know from other clusters.

    Cluster 6 is the Horizon Europe pillar funding research and innovation on “Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment”, organised into seven policy destinations under the European Green Deal, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the Farm to Fork strategy.

    What open data rules apply across all Horizon Europe clusters?

    Every Horizon Europe grant, regardless of cluster, operates under the Commission’s stated principle of making research data “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”. This baseline applies identically to Clusters 1 through 6 and is not something Cluster 6 changes or adds to.

    Three obligations sit inside this baseline. First, a living Data Management Plan is due within the first six months of the project and must be updated as the work progresses. Second, research data must be handled according to the FAIR principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Third, all peer-reviewed publications arising from the grant must be made immediately open access, either via an open-access journal or by depositing the accepted manuscript in a trusted repository with no embargo.

    According to the Horizon Europe Annotated Grant Agreement, beneficiaries must deposit machine-readable data and metadata in a trusted repository. None of this is Cluster 6-specific — it is the floor every applicant, in every cluster, must clear.

    What extra biodiversity data-sharing duties does Cluster 6 add?

    Cluster 6’s thematic link to the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 brings a second, additional layer that does not appear in the general programme text. This is the part administrators most often miss, because it is scattered across topic-level annexes rather than stated once in the core rules.

    • Recognised repositories: biodiversity and species-occurrence data generated under Cluster 6 topics is expected to flow into internationally recognised infrastructures, most commonly the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), using the Darwin Core data standard maintained by the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) community.
    • Research infrastructure alignment: proposals are expected to draw on established European research infrastructures for biodiversity and life-science data, including LifeWatch ERIC and ELIXIR, rather than building bespoke, one-off data platforms.
    • Access and benefit-sharing (ABS): where a project accesses genetic resources — for example in agrobiodiversity, microbiome or bioeconomy topics — applicants must comply with Regulation (EU) No 511/2014, the EU’s implementing legislation for the Nagoya Protocol, including due-diligence declarations at key project checkpoints.
    • Global Biodiversity Framework alignment: the draft and adopted 2026-2027 destinations reference the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted at CBD COP15 in December 2022, whose Target 21 specifically calls for improved availability of biodiversity data to decision-makers.

    None of these four points is a restatement of the general FAIR/DMP baseline. They are additive obligations that only attach to Cluster 6 — and, in the case of Nagoya Protocol compliance, to any topic across any cluster that touches genetic resources, but they surface most frequently in Cluster 6’s Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and Circular Economy and Bioeconomy Sectors destinations.

    How does Cluster 6 compare with Clusters 4 and 5 on data requirements?

    Administrators who support applicants across multiple clusters sometimes assume the extra biodiversity layer is programme-wide. It is not. Clusters 4 and 5 remain governed by the general Horizon Europe open-data baseline described above, with no equivalent dedicated data-sharing regime published in their 2026-2027 work programmes.

    Cluster Domain Cluster-specific data-sharing regime beyond the Horizon Europe baseline?
    Cluster 4 Digital, Industry and Space No dedicated cluster-wide regime; individual topics may reference EU common data spaces
    Cluster 5 Climate, Energy and Mobility No dedicated cluster-wide regime; individual topics may reference Copernicus and Destination Earth datasets
    Cluster 6 Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Yes — biodiversity/genetic-resource data via GBIF-compatible standards and Nagoya Protocol ABS compliance

    This distinction matters for institutional research offices: a Data Management Plan template built for a Cluster 4 or Cluster 5 grant will not, by default, cover the ABS due-diligence declarations or repository-mapping steps a Cluster 6 biodiversity topic requires.

    Which 2026 Cluster 6 calls are open now, and what are the deadlines?

    The Cluster 6 Work Programme 2026-2027 groups more than 58 topics into seven calls across seven destinations, following Info Days held in Brussels on 22-23 January 2026. As of July 2026, several calls have already closed their first round while others remain open or are still to launch.

    Call Destinations covered Opened Deadline(s) Status (July 2026)
    HORIZON-CL6-2026-01 Biodiversity; Circular economy and bioeconomy; Zero pollution 17 Apr 2026 17 Sep 2026 Open
    HORIZON-CL6-2026-02 Farm to Fork; Climate action; Communities 14 Jan 2026 14 Apr 2026 Closed
    HORIZON-CL6-2026-03 Governance and digital solutions 14 Jan 2026 15 Apr 2026 Closed
    HORIZON-CL6-2026-04 (COFUND) Governance — Partnership on Agriculture of Data 25 Aug 2026 26 Nov 2026 Not yet open
    HORIZON-CL6-2026-01-two-stage Biodiversity; Circular economy; Zero pollution 12 Feb 2026 Stage 1: 16 Apr 2026 / Stage 2: 23 Sep 2026 Stage 2 pending
    HORIZON-CL6-2026-02-two-stage Farm to Fork 12 Feb 2026 Stage 1: 14 Apr 2026 / Stage 2: 15 Sep 2026 Stage 2 pending
    HORIZON-CL6-2026-03-two-stage Governance 12 Feb 2026 Stage 1: 15 Apr 2026 / Stage 2: 30 Sep 2026 Stage 2 pending

    Research offices with Stage 1 applicants who passed through in April should now be finalising the ABS due-diligence and repository-mapping annexes ahead of the September Stage 2 deadlines — this is precisely where the biodiversity-specific obligations from the previous section get tested in a live submission.

    Cluster 6 open data: frequently asked questions

    What is the 2026 Work Programme of Horizon Europe?

    The 2026 Work Programme is the European Commission’s annually detailed set of funding calls implementing Horizon Europe’s 2025-2027 Strategic Plan. It is published per cluster, sets topic-level budgets, deadlines and eligibility conditions, and forms the legal basis on which applicants submit proposals through the Funding and Tenders Portal.

    What is the Cluster 6 Horizon Work Programme?

    Cluster 6 is the Horizon Europe funding stream for Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment. Its 2026-2027 edition funds over 58 topics across seven destinations, combining Research and Innovation Actions, Innovation Actions and Coordination and Support Actions with a combined 2026 budget exceeding €580 million.

    What is the 6 cluster Horizon Europe?

    Cluster 6 targets environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and unsustainable resource use by funding transformative research across food systems, the circular bioeconomy, pollution control and climate-resilient land and ocean management. It sits within Pillar II of Horizon Europe, alongside Clusters 1 to 5.

    What are the topics of Cluster 6?

    Cluster 6 topics span seven destinations: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Circular Economy and Bioeconomy Sectors, Clean Environment and Zero Pollution, Fair, Healthy and Environment-Friendly Food Systems, Land, Ocean and Water for Climate Action, Communities, and Governance, Observations and Digital Solutions.

    What this means for research offices supporting Cluster 6 applicants

    Institutional research offices that reuse a single, cluster-agnostic Data Management Plan template risk under-serving Cluster 6 applicants. The template needs a supplementary checklist covering repository selection against GBIF or Darwin Core compatibility, an ABS screening question for any genetic-resource sampling, and a named contact for Nagoya Protocol due-diligence sign-off.

    This is also useful evidence for funder-liaison teams explaining why a Cluster 6 proposal’s data section takes longer to clear internal review than a Cluster 4 or Cluster 5 submission — it carries more compliance surface, not administrative overcaution.

    Administrators tracking related programme rules — including broader research administration compliance requirements — should treat the biodiversity-data layer as a standing item on Cluster 6 proposal-development checklists through the remainder of the 2026-2027 work programme, since the underlying Nagoya Protocol and GBIF-alignment expectations are set to persist across subsequent Cluster 6 call rounds.

  • 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.