Abstract

Radboud University and the University of Glasgow are strategic partners, with a shared Radboud-Glasgow Collaboration Fund for pairs of researchers from both universities to collaborate on joint research projects. The Radboud-Glasgow collaboration support team seek to advise Collaboration Fund recipients on external funding they could apply for to continue their collaboration.

As the team specialised in supporting proposals for European funding, in the first year of Horizon Europe - with all the insecurity around association - some creativity was needed to support continuing research collaboration. As the Radboud- Glasgow collaboration fund offers support for small scale project and starting collaboration, follow-up funding is needed to create sustainable partnership activities We realized that we had to look at a wider array of funding to find fitting opportunities to ensure continuation of the funded research projects, thus looking beyond Horizon Europe.

Surprising opportunities popped up in national funding schemes: a chance to hop-on an existing project funded by the Dutch Cancer Fund for instance, and possibilities to participate in research consortia of the Dutch research council in the case of exclusive expertise. The UK national funder (UKRI) also allows up to 30% of total funding to international collaborators on some projects, under its International Co-Investigator Policy. This has prompted us to dive deeper into this previously un(der)-explored source of research funding.

This discussion table will focus on the question “How to align research support activities internally to create the most optimal external funding advice for an international research group?”.
We can share our experiences with this process in the context of the Radboud-Glasgow partnership and are interested in the experiences of the audience: do they in fact look at national funding when advising on international collaboration opportunities? How do they go about this? What other colleagues are involved?

In the end, we hope to have enticed people to think broader than Horizon Europe alone when it comes to international research funding. Moreover, making optimal use of the national opportunities for funding will also signal to the funder that there is a need to keep those options open. Finally, we hope to take back several approaches of how national and European research support come together on behalf of the researchers.