COST Academy: Sustainability of COST Actions networking event

30/11/2018

The COST Academy networking event on the Sustainability of COST Actions held on the 29 November 2018 in Brussels, Belgium.

The event offered 30 Chairs of running and recently ended Actions, the opportunity to discuss how to continue activities after their Action had finished, in order to consolidate and expand the initial community built within the COST Action. The focus of the discussion was based on activities that go beyond a research funding scheme and not on the continuation of COST Actions via another COST Action or European project.

COST Academy

Attendees of the COST Academy: Sustainability of COST Actions networking event

Participants of the event came from areas as diverse as transport, carotenoid research, 5G networks and multilingual Europe. During the event they exchanged with five speakers representing successful Action continuation, including the creation of associations, series of books or organisation of contests.

According to the participants, the exchange with the speakers was very beneficial and provided new ideas on how to take forward their activities. Important points raised during the session were: early planning of the follow-up activities, involvement of Early Career Investigators in leadership positions and motivation in keeping the international network alive.

Attendees also highlighted challenges, such as how to get funding for activities. In order to address these challenges, examples of free publishers, membership fees, co-organisation of conferences were mentioned as potential means to move forward.

Karina Marcus, Science Officer for the COST Association said of the event “Our expectation is to see one of the participants as the presenter of a successful continuation in one of the next events”