Joint Research Programme 2025: Call for proposals on Artificial Intelligence and Hydrogen

Only approved Norwegian research organisations are eligible to apply. See the list of approved research organisations.

Requirements relating to the Project Owner

The research organisation listed as the Project Owner in the application form must have approved the submission of the application.

Requirements relating to the project manager

You must have an approved doctoral degree or achieved associate professor qualifications before the application deadline. For the purposes of this call, being or having been employed as researcher 1, researcher 2 or senior researcher in the institute sector is considered to be associate professor competence.

Requirements relating to partners

Approved Norwegian research organisations and similar foreign organisations may participate as partners in the project and receive funding. We require that the project has partners from South Korea, and that the full application is sent to the National Research Foundation in South Korea by the application deadline.

You can apply for funding to cover the actual costs necessary to carry out the project. The Project Owner must obtain information on costs from the partners in the project. These costs must be entered in the cost plan under the cost type to which they belong.

We require that you break down the project budget into the following cost types in your application:

• payroll and indirect expenses, which are costs incurred by the Project Owner and partners.
• other project expenses, which are costs for other activities that are necessary to carry out the project's R&D activities. Any purchases from subcontractors must be entered here. All costs entered as "other operating expenses" must be specified in the application. 
• equipment, which includes operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment necessary to carry out the project

The item procurement of R&D services must not be used.

You can find detailed and important information about what to enter in the project budget.

on the website.  

Scope of support

The Research Council of Norway will provide a maximum of NOK 3 million of funding per project under this call, while the National Research Foundation in South Korea (NRF) will provide a maximum of KRW 360 million per project. The projects that are selected will receive funding from both sides.

Prerequisites for the award of funding

The projects must start on 1 July 2025. The latest permitted project completion is 30 June 2028.

In addition, you must be aware of the following if you should receive an award from us:

• The support to the research organisations goes to their non-economic activity in the form of independent research. It therefore does not constitute state aid. The Research Council assumes that the necessary accounting separation between the organisation's economic and non-economic activities is in place.

If the project is approved, the following must be in place when you revise the application:

• The Project Owner must establish a collaboration agreement(s) with all partners in the project. The collaboration agreement is intended to regulate mutual rights and obligations and ensure the integrity and independence of research. The collaboration agreement must also ensure that no collaborating undertaking receives indirect funding from the research organisation that is the Project Owner or from the collaborating research organisation. The cooperation agreement must therefore contain conditions that ensure that ESA's guidelines on state aid for R&D&I, section 28,  are complied with.
• Research organisations and the public sector (Project Owners and partners) that receive grants must have action plans for gender equality (GEPs) available on their websites.  
• The Research Council's prerequisites for awards can also be found in our general terms and conditions for R&D projects on the information page What the contract involves.
• The Research Council requires full and immediate open access for scientific articles, see Plan S - open access to publications.
• For all projects that handle data, the Project Owner must prepare a data management plan in connection with the revised application, where you will find more information about the requirements for data management plans in projects that receive funding from us.
• The Project Owner decides which archiving solution(s) will be used for storing research data that emerges from the project.
• For medical and health studies involving humans, the Research Council sets special requirements and guidelines for prospective registration of studies and publication of results.

Please note that you can only submit the pre-qualification application once. If you submit the application before the deadline and subsequently see that it still needs to be changed, you can create a new application – e.g. as a copy of the one you have already submitted – and in this way submit a new version before the deadline expires.

• The application and all attachments must be written in English.
• All attachments must be in PDF format.

Mandatory attachments

• Project description of a maximum of 20 pages. Use the english version of the project description you will submit to NRF in Korea. See also default template that you can download at the bottom of the page.
• CVs for the project manager and the most important project participants, each of a maximum of four pages. Use the default template that you can download at the bottom of the page.

All attachments to the application must be submitted with the application. We do not accept attachments submitted after the application deadline unless we have requested additional documentation.

We will not consider documents and websites linked to in the application, or attachments other than those specified above. Be careful to upload the correct attachment type, as there are no technical restrictions on what kind of templates it is possible to upload in the application form.

The Research Council will only assess whether formal requirements relating to a Norwegian partner have been met, based on this pre-qualification application.

The National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) assesses the quality of the applications submitted for the call in Korea, which can be found on NRF's website.  Please note that the Korean call is only in Korean, but information in English is available in the appendices.

The Research Council only assesses whether formal requirements relating to a Norwegian partner are met. Applications that do not meet the formal requirements will be rejected, and the collaborative application will then also be rejected by the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Applications that are outside the thematic limits set out in the call will be rejected, and this is assessed by the National Research Foundation of Korea.

The National Research Foundation of Korea pre-assesses the applications and assesses the quality of the applications with the help of panels according to its own procedures, which are described in the Korean call, as well as the appendix "Signed agreement NRF -RCN lead agency session 24.pdf"

We expect to publish which applications will receive funding on 31 May 2025.