COST – European Cooperation in Science and Technology – is one of the longest-running European instruments supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe. COST is also the first and widest European intergovernmental network for coordination of nationally funded research activities.

COST’s mission is to strengthen Europe in scientific and technical research through the support of European cooperation and interaction between European Researchers. It also aims to maximise European Synergy and added value in non-competitive and pre-normative research. COST enables scientists to collaborate in a wide spectrum of activities grouped under nine key scientific Domains.

COST provides financial support for cooperation efforts of scientific groups across Europe and the coordination of these research networks called “Actions”. The support will cover the costs of networking activities such as meetings (e.g. travel, subsistence, local organiser support), conferences, workshops, short-term scientific exchanges, training schools, publications and dissemination activities. COST does not fund the research itself.

The Council Decision of 19 December 2006 concerning the Specific Programme "Cooperation" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) (2006/971/EC) sets aside a minimum of EUR 210 million in Annex II and up to EUR 250 million for COST, subject to a mid term evaluation.

The mid term evaluation 2010 did recommend to the European Commission that ‘the appropriate process be put in place to allocate the additional EUR 40 million reserved in FP7 for COST’.

In April 2011, the European Commission communicated the release of EUR 30 million to COST. The additional funding raises the total budget for COST to 240 million for FP7.

Short answer: From the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme.
In more detail: The Council Decision of 19 December 2006 concerning the Specific Programme "Cooperation" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) (2006/971/EC) sets aside a minimum of EUR 210 million in Annex II.

Only the institutions of the 36 COST countries can propose an Action. For this:

• Contact your COST National Coordinator (CNC)

• See the COST Guidelines.

I/ For institutions of the 36 COST Countries:

a) If your country has already accepted the Action's Memorandum of Understanding, but has not yet nominated its representatives:

• contact your COST National Coordinator (CNC) who can officially nominate you as a representative of your country to the MC committee.
• It is also recommended that you inform the Chair of the Action of your interest.

b) If your country has not yet accepted the Action's Memorandum of Understanding:

• Contact your COST National Coordinator (CNC) who will launch your country's participation in the relevant Action (only possible if national funding for the Actions’ activity is available). Once done, the CNC can officially nominate you as a representative of your country to the MC committee. It is also recommended that you inform the Chair of the Action of your interest.

II/ For institutions of non-COST Countries

COST encourages institutions from non-COST countries to participate in COST Actions following the bottom-up principle and if the Committee of Senior Officials (CSO) believes it to be of mutual benefit. The CSO approves on a case by case basis.

In general researchers from non-COST countries institutions do not receive economic support from COST, but exceptions are possible.

For the near-neighbouring countries up to two researchers from each country may be reimbursed for attending COST Actions meetings. Moreover, researchers from these countries are eligible to participate in other activities decided at the level of individual Actions (such as meetings, short-term scientific missions, training schools and conferences).

In addition, COST set up reciprocal agreements with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina. The financial contribution provided by COST for a European scientist travelling to such a country is a fixed grant of up to EUR 3 000 per visit for Australia and New Zealand and up to EUR 2 500 for Argentina and South Africa.

On the COST National Coordinator page.

Contact the COST Action Chair of the Action. You can search Actions in the Actions database.

Contact the Chair of the Action (directly or via a colleague from the Action or via the COST Office) and obtain the invitation to participate in the suitable COST working group.

Contact the Chair of the Action (directly, via a colleague from the Action or via the COST Office) and obtain the invitation to participate in a specific event of the Action.

COST operates a continuous Open Call, with periodic Collection Dates. Details of the next Collection Date and access to the online system through which proposals must be submitted can be found on the COST Open Call page.

Not recommended. You need to decide who would Chair the Action. The applicant is normally elected Chair but you could put forward the one of the other applications as vice-Chair. This setup will be confirmed by the management committee at its first meeting.

• Contact your national representatives to familiarise yourself with COST.
• Read up on running Actions, you may want to join an existing Action rather than create your own or run the risk that your proposal is rejected because an Action on the same topic exists.
• Read the Guidelines for Assessment, Monitoring, Evaluation and Dissemination of Results of COST Actions with a focus on the eligibility criteria.
• Collect relevant (supporting) documents and work on finding partners for your proposal.
• Think of a possible grant holder already at this stage.

Yes. By “Nationally-funded” you should understand 'domestically'-funded, i.e. below EU level The funding can therefore come from devolved or local government, research organisations, charities, industry, even the Church.

No. Selection is by a process of anonymous peer review, therefore writing to the COST Office or asking national representatives to lobby on your behalf will have no effect.

The evaluation process is the same for all 9 scientific domains and the trans-domain proposals; takes approximately 9 months from the collection date to the final approval and is described in detail in the Guidelines for Assessment, Monitoring, Evaluation and Dissemination of Results on the Open Call page.

A quick summary:

Preliminary Proposals:

1. Are checked against eligibility criteria by the COST Office;
2. Eligible proposals are assessed by the relevant Domain Committee or the TDP-SAB;
3. 80 top-ranked proposers are asked to submit a Full Proposal bringing the funding probability to 38%

Full Proposals:

1. Are evaluated by an External Expert Panel (EEP) online (max. 8 experts invited to review proposals based on their expertise and knowledge of the topic at hand);
2. The EEP meets with the relevant DC Chair to decide on the final proposals to be invited for a DC Hearing;
3. Approximately 75% of the full proposals are presented at a DC hearing after which a final top priority ranking is made by each Domain.

Final list of proposals to be approved: The COST Office handles the process from now on:

1. A final list is prepared for the JAF Group who discuss the proposals and prepare them for approval by the CSO;
2. The CSO approves the COST Actions (usually 30 to 35 per collection date)

Document COST 4115/10 lists the assessment criteria (Annex A, page 13). It is therefore vital you study these and try to make sure your application would get at least a total of 26/36, since the overall threshold is 70%.The document is available on the guidelines page.

No, you do not.

• Do not copy and paste from other proposals you have written.
• Try to avoid using buzz words or jargon.
• It is a good idea to have your proposal checked for language and grammar errors.
• Try to make your proposal interesting to read, also by non-experts.

The most important thing is clarity. You can use cross references rather than repetitions if that makes the content clearer and more consistent. On the other hand, don’t forget that too many cross-references may obscure your argument. Remember: the assessors have limited time. They might be annoyed by frequent redundancies, as well as by an excessive amount of cross-references. It is in your best interest to ease the assessor’s job.

In the COST Guidelines section of this website in general and in particular the 'COST Vademecum' and the 'Rules and Proceedings for implementing COST Actions'.

A successful proposal:

1. clearly spells out the scientific issue and its proposed impact;
2. thinks about how to involve interdisciplinary competences;
3. does not confuse a COST Action with an FP7 proposal;
4. explains the state-of-the-art scientifically and with a view to the networking aspect
5. has concrete plans for gender balance; involvement of young researchers or dissemination activities.

Proposals receiving low marks often:

1. appear to do no more than perpetuate existing structures;
2. do not involve countries that have a good reputation in the field;
3. propose a non-standard management structure (i.e. other than a Management Committee (MC) meeting twice a year, with up to four working groups (WGs) also meeting twice a year);
4. suggest that the proposer does not understand what COST is or how it works;
5. were last minute submissions.

No, the assessment is anonymous.

You will receive the marks obtained for all categories and the assessors’ comments (please note that these comments are not used for the final ranking and are considered as feedback to the applicant only).

No, but for archiving purposes it will be kept in the database of the COST Office.

Yes, but you have to register for a new login since logins are linked to a specific collection date. Please also ensure that you specify that the proposal is a re-submission (by selecting the appropriate check box).

The ESF was established in 1974 to coordinate collaboration in research, networking, funding of international research programmes, and strategic and science policy activities at a European level. ESF is a bottom-up organisation, independent of national political decision making bodies and of the European Commission. The Member Organisations of ESF are at present 79 public national funding agencies of fundamental research, research performing organisations, academies, and learned societies.

For more information, please visit the ESF website where an FAQ section regarding the relationship between COST and ESF is available.

When COST and the ESF organise joint events such as the high level research conferences, COST refers to them as COST-ESF events and ESF refers to them as ESF-COST events.

This makes it easier to identify where the communication originates from while pointing out the cooperation between both organisations at the same time.

The COST Committee of Senior Officials is the main decision-making body and formulates the general strategy for COST. The CSO does not have the legal personality which would allow it to receive a contract from the European Commission and to manage the COST Office which is responsible for implementing the CSO decisions.

To that end, the ESF acts as the legal entity to provide and manage the COST Office in Brussels through a specific contract with the European Commission.

To give a concrete example: COST Office staff is employed by the ESF in France with a contract under Belgian labour law to work on the decisions taken by the CSO.

The COST Committee of Senior Officials decides upon its implementing agent. The CSO decision was communicated to the European Commission via the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union. The European Commission then signed a contract with the ESF, acting as implementing agent of COST. The COST structure page contains more detailed information.

The current contract between the European Science Foundation and the European Commission runs until 1 June 2014, which is the end date of FP7. The CSO decided at its 178th meeting on 25 and 26 May in Riga, Latvia, to invite the ESF to remain implementing agent until the end of FP7.

The ESF Governing Council confirmed its commitment to remain implementing agent for COST until June 2014 at its meeting of the Governing Council on 29 and 30 September 2010.

For an update on the ESF’s structural discussions, please visit the ESF website. Since the ESF’s continuation as implementing agent for COST for the duration of FP7 has been confirmed by both parties, the ongoing debate in ESF does not concern COST at the moment.

Should circumstances change, however, the CSO can choose a new implementing agent.

Currently, no decision on the implementing agent beyond June 2014 has been taken.

Some pre-existing pages of the COST website were relaunched in May 2011 with data input directly from e-COST (COST's internal contact database).

The BETA pages contain the officially released and internally tested version of the synchronisation platform. The BETA version is intended for external testing of the pages on the one hand and, on the other hand, indicates that additional functionalities are still to be released. Website visitors are welcome to notify the COST webmaster of any problems, suggestions or new requirements they may have.

They are both calendar file types that allow you to store the event in your Calendar (e.g. iCal (.ics) for Mac or vCalendar (.vcs) in Outlook 2010 for Windows). Both files contain the same information. Please note that you may have to update the calendar information manually. This depends on the software you use. For example, we are aware of a Microsoft Office bug in Outlook 2003 that requires you to adjust the .vcs file slightly once uploaded.

You can use any of the buttons on the home page, the search function in the top right corner of this screen or the Sitemap.

If you know COST well, you may find the following redirects useful too:

• www.cost.eu/guidelines
• www.cost.eu/vademecum
• www.cost.eu/opencall
• www.cost.eu/news
• www.cost.eu/events
• www.cost.eu/bmbs (replace bmbs with the other Domain abbreviations (cmst, essem, fa, fps, isch, ict, mpns, tud) as needed)

A cookie is a message given to a web browser by a web server. A COST cookie is stored by the browser in a text file on your hard drive. The next time you visit the COST Website, your browser will send the cookie to the COST server, which will use this information to present you with customised web pages. You can choose whether to allow cookies onto your computer or not. Cookies can be deleted from your hard drive at all times. Functions are reset when the cookie is deleted.

If you want to recommend a specific page of the COST website, you visit the page of your choice and click the recommend button in the top right corner of your screen. Just fill in the form that appears and click send.
You can only send the link to one page per recommendation.

If you wish to store a specific page of the COST website to read later, you visit the page of your choice and click the pin button in the top right corner of your screen. Then press 'pin this page' in the middle of the page.

You can pin as many pages as you wish, one page per time. Your selection will be stored on your personal pinboard for the next 30 days.

You must have cookies enabled to use this feature and make sure that your browser does not clear cookies when you close it. Your pinboard is only displayed in the browser and on the computer you used to "pin".

Depending on the source, RSS is described as Really Simple Syndication (most popular), Rich Site Summary or RDF Site summary. RSS is an application of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and is a format for syndicating news.

RSS-news items can be read via a newsreader. Newsreaders display information feeds from your chosen websites on your computer, they warn you when a new item is put online and enable you to read the item without actually having to visit the website. Many high profile news and information providers (e.g. BBC, Reuters and Yahoo) and several national newspapers offer this service.

Well-known readers are Sharpreader, Feedreader, Newzcrawler, RSSreader and Rocketreader. Macintosh-users can use readers such as Newsfire, NetNewswire, Netvibes and PulpFiction. RSS-readers are often available for free and are either installed as a separate computer programme or as an integrated plug-in to your e-mail programme (e.g. Newsgator) or internet browser (e.g. Pluck). Internet browsers Internet Explorer 7, Firefox and Safari 2.0 support RSS as well.

The COST Website has variable text size enabled for vision impairment compliance so you can adapt the font size in your browser settings. As an indication, the site has been designed with a "Medium" font size.

In Internet Explorer, go to the "View" menu and change your choice in "Text Size". In Mozilla Firefox, go to the “View” menu and change your choice in “Zoom”.

To be able to read Portable Document Format (PDF) files, you will have to download the free Adobe Reader and install it on your computer.

Zip files are single files that contain one or more compressed files. Zip files compress data thus saving disk space and download time. To be able to uncompress .Zip files, you will have to install e.g. WinZip on your computer. Windows XP also supports .Zip files.