Large Interdisciplinary Researcher Project

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 to the Research Council. 

Requirements relating to the project manager 

You must have an approved doctoral degree or equivalent before the application deadline. 

If you do not have an approved doctoral degree, but have associate professor qualifications or employment as a researcher 1, researcher 2 or senior researcher in the institute sector or in a health trust, you can also apply. 

Requirements relating to partners 

The projects must be interdisciplinary and include collaboration between researchers from different disciplines. If the collaboration is between researchers at different institutions, the institutions must be listed as partners. For partners, the following applies: 

Only approved Norwegian research organisations (see "Who is eligible to apply?" above) or equivalent research organisations in other countries may be partners and receive funding for a Researcher Project. 

Other types of organisations, including companies and other enterprises, may not be partners in research projects. 

Read more about partners.  

As the Project Owner or partner in the project, you can engage subcontractors to deliver services and contribute to the implementation of certain tasks in the project. Subcontractors cannot be given rights to project results. Organisations that are subject to the regulations for public procurement must in the usual way carry out the selection of subcontractors in line with these regulations. You cannot have R&D suppliers in the project. 

One and the same actor cannot have two different roles in the project. This means that a subcontractor cannot be the Project Owner or a partner in the project at the same time. 

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 costs, which relates to researcher time (including research fellowship positions and the project manager's position) at the research organisations participating in the project. For doctoral scholarships, the support is limited to three full-time equivalents. For postdoctoral fellowships, the support is limited to a minimum of three years and a maximum of four years. See also the Regulations relating to terms of employment for positions such as postdoctoral fellow, research fellow, research assistant and specialist candidate (in Norwegian only).  
• Equipment, which includes operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment and research infrastructure necessary to carry out the project.  
• Other operating expenses, which are expenses for other activities necessary to carry out the project's R&D activities. Any purchases from subcontractors must be entered here, and if the purchase is more than NOK 100,000, it must be specified, otherwise all costs you enter as "other operating expenses" must be specified in the application.  

The item Procurement of R&D services cannot be used.  

If doctoral and postdoctoral research fellows are included in the project and there are specific plans for them to stay abroad, this may be included in the application. The Research Council also has a separate call for proposals for research stays abroad for doctoral and post-doctoral research fellows. Please note that the separate call for proposals has a number of requirements for who can receive support for the stay abroad. 

If there are specific plans for visiting researchers or stays abroad for researchers in the project, this may be included in the application. The rules for such stays and information about rates can be found on the budget information page (see link below). 

You will find detailed and important information on the website about what to enter in the project budget.

Scope of funding 

Funding of NOK 12–25 million per project is available under this call. 

We do not require that you provide own funding. However, if our lump sum rates do not cover all costs for recruitment positions in the university and university college or institute sector or for research positions in the university and university college sector, we assume that you cover the difference with your own funding. For research positions in the institute sector, you must use the reported hourly rates. 

Ethics 

The Research Council requires a high standard of research ethics in the projects we fund, and ethics is included in the assessment criterion for Research Quality. In the template for the project description, there is a separate section that deals with this. The description of ethics is first and foremost an assurance to the peers that there is a plan in place to deal with the most important ethical dilemmas in the project. If you need to describe this in more detail, this can be done elsewhere in the project description, for example under method selection, or you can do so in the data management plan(s) (see below). 

The responsibility for compliance with the research ethics standard lies with the individual researcher and research institution (cf.  The Act on the Organisation of Research Ethics). The panel's assessment and the Research Council's decision on funding do not entail any research ethics approval. 

Conditions for funding 

We do not award state aid under this call. This means that the funding should only go to their non-economic activity. We assume that the necessary accounting separation is in place. Our conditions for awarding and disbursing support for the first year, and any commitments and payments for subsequent years, can be found in our general terms and conditions for R&D projects on the information page What the contract consists of.  

If you are granted the project, the following must be in place when you revise the application: 

• All grant recipients that are research organisations public sector bodies (Project Owners and partners) must have a Gender Equality Plan (GEP) available on their websites. This must be in place before the contract is signed for projects with grants from us. The requirement does not apply to the private sector, interest groups or the voluntary sector.  
• 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 grant application. Here you will find more information about requirements for data management plans in projects that receive funding from the Research Council. 
• The Project Owner is responsible for selecting which archiving solution(s) to use for storing research data generated during the project.  
• For medical and health-related studies involving human participants, the Research Council stipulates special requirements and guidelines for registration and disclosure of medical and health-related studies involving human participants.

The application must be created and submitted via My RCN Web. You can change and submit the application several times until the application deadline. We recommend that you submit your application as soon as you have completed the application form and uploaded the required attachments. When the application deadline expires, it is the version of the application that was submitted most recently that we process. 

The application must meet the following requirements: 

• The application and all attachments must be written in English, with the exception of the description of relevance to the topic, which you can write in Norwegian or English. 
• All attachments must be in PDF format. 
• Mandatory attachments must be included. 
• Requirements relating to the Project Manager and the Project Owner must be met. 
• The project must start between 1 October 2025 and 1 April 2026. 
• You must clearly demonstrate that the project is within the priorities described in the topic from which you are applying for funding. 

The application may be rejected if it does not meet the requirements in the list above. 

Mandatory attachments 

• Project description 
• CV for the project manager 
• description of relevance to the topic 

Applications that do not meet the requirements above will be rejected. You must use standard templates for all required attachments. The templates can be found at the bottom of the call. 

Optional attachments 

• CVs for the most important project participants, each of a maximum of four pages. It is mandatory to use the CV template at the bottom of the call. 
  • You may assess which project participants are the most important, and in which cases it will be of importance for the application processing to assess the project participants' qualifications. 
• If you wish, you can attach a brief description of competence or suggestions for up to three peers you believe would be suitable to assess your application. We are not obliged to use the suggestions, but can use them if necessary. 

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 links to websites 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. 

Applications will be assessed in light of the purpose of the call and the following criteria: 

We will assess your application as it has been submitted. It is not relevant how an identical or approximately similar application has previously been assessed by us. 

Here you can read more about the processing procedure for Researcher Projects. 

Once the application deadline has passed, we will first check that all formal requirements are met. Applications that do not satisfy the formal requirements will be rejected. 

Applications that are outside the thematic limitations set out in the call will not be eligible for funding. Decisions on this are made by the individual portfolio boards. 

Where the requirements are met, we will make the application, with all mandatory attachments, available in an online portal for referees who individually assess the criteria Research quality – potential for advancing the research frontier, Research quality – quality in R&D activities, Impacts and Implementation. The referees will then meet in thematic panels where they will reach a consensus assessment of the application for each of the four criteria.   

The referees assess the applications for open research practice as part of the criterion Impact. On this website, you will find more information about the assessment of open science in grant applications.  

If the panel assesses all criteria for a mark of 5 or higher, the application will also be assessed on the basis of the criterion Relevance to the topic by Research Council case officers.  

The assessment of the five above criteria is summarised in an overall mark for the application. The Research Council's administration then creates ranking lists based on this grade. 

Finally, it is the portfolio boards that decide whether the applications will receive funding or not. Their decisions are based on the ranking lists and an overall portfolio assessment. 

On this website you will find more information about portfolio valuation