Grants Office Newsletter December 2024

Dear Researchers of the University of Basel,

In the last issue of our Newsletter for this year, we talk to Prof Anna Petrig from the Faculty of Law about the COST project that she will be coordinating over the next four years.

We congratulate our successful SNSF Starting Grantees, whose projects will be financed by the SNSF as part of the measures to compensate the non-association to Horizon Europe. On that subject, we report on the hopes for increased access to Horizon Europe next year.

Taking a further look into 2025, the SNSF has announced several new international collaborative Calls to be launched in the coming months. Further details can be found in the events and Calls section below.

After a busy but fruitful year, we send season’s greetings and wish you all a nice break and a good start to 2025.

The Grants Office Team

Eve Silfverberg, Gillianne Bowman, Aleksandra Grzegorczyk, Luca Wacker & Julia Wyss

This year, the negotiation teams in Brussels and Bern have been working intensively on the future relationship between Switzerland and the European Union (EU), and at the end of this week the Federal Council is expected to announce the results of these discussions. What will this mean for research? One of the aims is to “ensure more systematic participation in EU programmes” for Switzerland, which includes Horizon Europe.

Although Switzerland is not fully associated to Horizon Europe, there have been some very positive developments this year, including access to this year’s ERC Calls. If all goes well, such transitional arrangements should be extended in 2025, allowing researchers in Switzerland to apply to almost all Horizon Europe Calls as equal partners and also to coordinate collaborative projects. It remains to be seen how the political processes develop. We will keep you updated and inform you about what this means for the preparation of your proposal.

In March, we plan the first event about the “Health Cluster” collaborative projects. Further targeted events for other Calls will follow later in the year. An overview of the already announced Calls can be found here.

Human rights at sea is the focus of the newly acquired COST Action project, “BlueRights”, led by Prof. Anna Petrig from the Faculty of Law.

In an interview for the Grants Office newsletter, she explains the main aim of the project and shares her experience in preparing the proposal.

The 2025 Call for proposals for COST Actions has the deadline 21^st October 2025.

Read more.

Congratulations to the six grantees who were awarded an SNSF Starting Grant from the 2024 Call.

The Department of Social Sciences celebrates three Grants from Janina Grabs, Matthias Leanza and Luregn Lenggenhager. Susanne Schmidt will join the Department of History, Mariana Borsa the Department of Biomedicine and the Biozentrum celebrates a grant from Yuping Li who recently joined them as assistant professor.

We wish them all the very best with their projects.

The Open Science Team at the University Library has the following updates:

Read and Publish Agreement with Wiley: Discussions with Wiley regarding an Agreement for 2025, with Open Access publication options for the upcoming year, are ongoing. Please check our updates on the library webpage. An overview of existing open access publishing options is available on Open Access Unibas. And if you have questions please contact: openaccess@unibas.ch

Cost coverage by the SNSF of journal articles: Please be aware that from January 2025 on, the SNSF will not reimburse costs for Gold Open Access articles. Invoices should be submitted directly, before any payment has been made

Research Data Management: If you are you working with personal data the checklist "Dealing with personal data in research" guides you through helpful steps.

Horizonte - The Swiss Research Magazine, jointly published by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Academies of Arts and Science, features contributions from Dominique de Quervain (Department of Biomedicine) and Katrin Bopp (University Hospital) on The never-ending pandemic and new treatments for Long-Covid and Claske Dijkema (Swisspeace) on Understanding violence in the banlieus.

On another note, the SNSF Scientific Image Competition 2025 is now open. Submit your research photos or videos until 31 January 2025. With a little bit of luck, your photo will appear in our Grants Office Newsletter.

The Grants Office would like to congratulate:

• Andreas Barbero, Valentina Basoli, Anne-Cécile Hebel, Henriette Heinrich, Markus Kalberer, Diego Kyburz and Stavros Stagakis for their EU projects
• The PIs of 31 SNSF projects
• Lorenza Mondada and Sergio Wittlin for their Weave/Lead Agency projects
• Bernice Elger, Alfred Früh and Sarah Koch with a total of four NFP 83 and 84 projects
• The PIs of 12 SPARK projects
• Markus Heim, Sandro Nuciforo, Dominique de Quervain and Andreas Papassotiropoulos for their Innosuisse projects
• Mike Hall for the Balzan Prize
• Jürg Utzinger for his Belmont Forum project
• Mattia Zampieri for a FreeNovation grant
• Matthias Schwenkglenks and Mihaela Zavolan for their Krebsforschung Schweiz grant
• Markus Krajewski for a NOMIS Foundation project

Check out Research Professional for more national and international Calls.