Hi Nikos,
On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 06:36:06PM +0200, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 8:47 AM, Karsten Gerloff gerloff@fsfeurope.org wrote:
Right. Getting funding to Free Software projects is important; but surprisingly often, EU projects aren't an effective or efficient way of doing it. That said, it seems that our work with the Commission over the past years has borne some fruit. We had been pushing the EC to address exactly the problem you're highlighting, and make it easier for Free Software developers to participate without a legal entity. I discussed this again with an EC project officer, and he told me that in Horizon 2020, natural persons can participate. I haven't had a chance to review the documentation yet -- feel free to beat me to it :-)
Well, at least from my experience with FP7 the typical submission was from a consortium of companies and universities, I wasn't aware of any single company/university projects.
Participating as an individual wasn't an option in FP7.
I've looked around the EC's Horizon 2020 pages for a bit. The first thing I've found is this:
http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/docs/h2020-funding-guide/grants/ap...
according to which the best options for individuals working on their own are
- European Research Council (ERC) research grants – support frontier research by individual researchers and teams.
- Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions – support researcher mobility. Besides research funding, scientists have the possibility to gain experience abroad and in the private sector, and to complete their training with competences useful for their careers.
The Curie grants did exist in FP7, too. Also, I haven't yet seen what the EC says about individuals participating as part of a consortium.
Interestingly, the EC apparently also plans to use prizes as an incentive mechanism, though no details seem to be currently available.
Best regards, Karsten