Making SOS-TIPS happen

Applying for a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship

Your project is made up of major events ("Milestones"), the outputs you promised ("Deliverables"), and the Trainings you aim to participate in. These three are organized into "Work Packages" to help with organizing them more systematically and keeping track of the key components of the project.
I have 7 WPs as described in the figure to the left below; the first 3 are strictly related to the core of the proposed project: software development, empirical study, and analysis / intervention-development. WPs 4-7 are parallel WPs spanning the entire project life-cycle. Open Science/Sustainability, Dissemination/Communication, Training, and Project Management. The first was optional (I personally found it important), the last three were "mandatory" components of the research plan; you really shouldn't submit a proposal without these.

As I wrote earlier, I will expand on every slide, but if you want to know more about Communication / Dissemination / Exploitation now, then I already have a blog entry for you :)

Partners
This grant is awarded to an individual, but it's actually a collaboration among several individuals and institutions. The point of MSCA IFs is providing training to individuals, while their completing an international, interdisciplinary project with several stakeholders. The best people to work with are people you are already in contact with. If you are not in contact with anyone outside of your country, then it is never too early to approach people/labs/departments. Usually, people are happy to engage with you, talk about a potential initiative together, etc.

I was lucky, I was already in contact with two institutions (well, groups/people) and had worked with them earlier. When I was daydreaming about this project, I was also considering: why would this be worth it to my potential partner institutions/working groups? I think keeping that in mind is incredibly important. Also, moving beyond yourself and asking dramatic questions like "Why is this good for the EU/world/target group?" is also beneficial. More on that later.

Being Connected
I remember applying for a Wiley grant (something like this?) maybe two years ago, and I was surprised to see they asked for my Twitter handle in the application. In hindsight, I get it: they were trying to assess the impact one's communication of a grant/output would have. But also, I don't get it: why would Twitter be the sole indicator of this? I do see that Twitter, at least in my case, is more about professional contacts, compared to other social media. But this is a very Western thing, no? I don't think I have a single Twitter contact from Hungary. It's interesting to see what catches on where...for example, I think more Hungarians embraced Viber than they did Whatsapp. Why does all this matter? It kind of boils down to how connected you are, professionally. Are you part of a greater community or multiple communities? If so, it really does have an effect on how many people come into contact with your work, how many citations you get, how many times you are asked to write an article for a journal or hold a talk...

Being connected to others in your discipline and various societies also has an effect on best practices you come into contact with, cutting edge technologies, trends in your profession and your specific topics of interest. Your involvement with a community/communities affects the literature you explore, the people you engage with, and the opportunities you hear about, both formally and informally. If I could travel back in time, I would tell myself this as I'm starting my PhD...it is SO important to be part of a professional community. I will reflect more on this later, but I must say, coming from a (Central-) Eastern European country, we tend to isolate ourselves...there are several reasons for this, and it can have grave consequences. Just wanted to mention this here; still trying to formulate my observations.

Research and Innovation (R&I) Performance
Directly related to the above topic is something potential applicants should be aware of.  While I was writing the application, I came to understand that the EU has various ways of categorizing member states in terms of research and academic performance. A major distinction is made between "low and high research & innovation" countries, which can be further divided into more subtle categories according to different indicators. To someone who has experience in applying for EU grants, this may not be news. Often, institutions in Eastern Europe become part of large consortia applying for e.g. Horizon 2020 grants, but not necessarily because they have prior relations with those in the consortium. There are databases connecting universities that contain working groups/departments, their areas of expertise, and other specifics...many EU grants will require that low R&I countries be involved in the consortium, and so groups of institutions may reach out to working groups in low R&I countries, or "widening countries", to fulfill this obligation. The idea behind this, I guess, is to minimize the gap between low and high R&I countries, spur the flow of information and best practices, promote more wide-scale international collaborations among member states, etc.

For some reason, it surprised me that I was a citizen of a widening country. The whole categorization took me by surprise, as did where I fit into this EU-level typology. I guess I was more optimistic about where my country was in terms of R&I? I don't know. The point is, these typologies and quotas may not be the best way to tackle geographic and other inequalities in research, but I'm guessing there is no better way at this point. As someone living in a country in the "low" category, I can see it as an opportunity. I think these quotas are trying to help with the professional isolation I touched on above, and help with the transfer of local knowledge and expertise. An interesting side-note is that there is an MSCA IF category intended for projects realized in widening countries, which are supposed to be easier to get...? Again, not sure about this whole subject yet, but will be expanding on this later. Also, I'd like to know more about the specific indicators and criteria involved in calculating R&I performance.

As I said earlier, the purpose of this blog is to help applicants (and fellows) through an open, straightforward, and transparent discussion of the grant writing process and its implementation. In line with this, I am uploading my grant proposal, the ethics statement, and my evaluation. They are anonymized to only include those parties who are already in the project; there are some parties that still need to be contacted at this point, so I am removing them for now.
Why Open Science? We do science to make the world a better place, and being open in our science, sharing and helping each other leads to better science, hence a better world.

While I was doing research to write my own proposal, I found only one other, full-text SOC proposal online. I want to give a shout-out to Shannon Chance for making hers public as well! It would be wonderful to eventually have a repository of MSCA proposals regardless of whether they were funded in the end. Kudos to Open Grants for already making this a reality, albeit with (mostly) American grants/proposals. Ah! There's one MSCA IF! Applause for Miguel Navascués! I will also add mine soon...

European Commission Resources

This is a non-exhaustive resource bank...there's so much you can find just doing searches for various aspects of the grant and following hyperlinks from official EC sites. But below are some things I didn't know about, which may help you...

-Did you know you can view a model grant agreement? Here it is.
-EC/EU resources on ethics, including self-assessment here.
-Did you / are you planning to enter the Open Research Data pilot? More info on that here.
-I will go into this more in the Management section, but adding a thought here as well: KNOW YOUR REPORTING RESPONSIBILITIES. I had no idea about the specifics...I knew I had to write a report at the end of the outgoing phase and then at the end of the whole project, but I didn't know you can access specific information about how they will want you to report on what in a continuous and periodic fashion. This is good to know when you are writing your application, as it can influence the deliverables you write into your proposal.

Please note that the Online Manual for your project may be at a different URL, for funding programs in 2021-2027 see this site.