Application Support

The Research Funding Team, Research Services (contactable via researchgrants@admin.ox.ac.uk) provides advice and guidance in various areas. These include finding funding calls, using the submission system, completing application templates and specific funder requirements (cost eligibility, funding model, evaluation criteria etc).

All applications to Horizon Europe calls must be routed through the Research Funding Team for institutional approval before submission. This includes fellowship applications and the outline stage of two-stage calls. The Research Funding Team produce application information sheets for the most popular Horizon Europe funding schemes, which can be found on our Factsheets & Presentations page.

All Horizon Europe applications include a mandatory set of ethics-related questions. If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, you will need to complete an ‘Ethics self-assessment’ as part of the application. This describes the ethical issues relevant to your project and the actions that you will take to mitigate these. EC requirements are set out on the EC's website and guidance on how to complete the self-assessment is provided.

Information about Oxford ethics requirements and processes can be found on the Research Support website. 

The EC have also included questions on Security considerations of the proposal in the same section of the application.

Open access is a mandatory requirement of Horizon Europe funding. The Open Access Oxford website provides information on Open Access processes at Oxford. Eligible costs of compliance should be included in project budgets at application stage - but can only be claimed where publication is in fully open access journals.

Research data management and open data provisions are mandatory in Horizon Europe. As a result of this, specific requirements including provision of a data management plan must be met. Any costs involved can be included in the project budget. More information on Research data management can be found on the Research Data Oxford website.

For help with planning for clinical trials (and the relationship and responsibilities within a collaborative project consortium) please contact the Research Services Research Governance, Ethics & Assurance Team. Contact information is available on the Research Support website.

Gender equality is a core concern of the European Union. Gender balance is promoted in research teams and sex and/or gender analysis is expected to be integrated into research design and content.

Best practice in applications is to specify the gender of the people primarily responsible for carrying out the proposed activities. Also, equal opportunities between men and women should be explicitly promoted in order to achieve gender balance at all levels in research teams. For all relevant research topics, describe how sex and/or gender analysis has been taken into account in the project’s content. More information is can be found on the European Commission's gender pages.

The University’s Equality and Diversity Unit’s web pages contain a lot of useful information including information on Oxford’s involvement in Equality Charters.