The QuantERA Call Secretariat has prepared answers to frequently asked questions, in order to provide assistance to all projects funded under the QuantERA Call 2025.
Basic principles and requirements concerning projects implementation are described in the Guidelines for Project Coordinators, which can be downloaded HERE.
The latest date at which your project could start is the end of September 2026.
If in a specific case there are reasons preventing the project from starting before this date, please contact the QuantERA Call Secretariat and justified delays will be considered.
All partners of a consortium should strive to start their part of the project on approximately the same date. In justified cases, an individual project partner may formally start their activities later, without delaying the start of the entire consortium.
Yes, each project is required to operate under a Consortium Agreement (CA) addressing at least the following topics:
The document has to be signed by all partners and sent to QuantERA Coordination Office (e-mail) no later than three months after the start of a project. Please note that some Funding Agencies require that the Consortium Agreement is signed before the contract can be finalised. If you have further queries, please, contact your national Funding Agency.
The Consortium Agreement is prepared by the consortium of the project, without QuantERA’s intervention. You can start from the DESCA model usually used for Horizon Europe projects, and modify it to fit your needs.
In accordance with the European Commission requirements, communication activities of the beneficiaries related to the action (including media relations, conferences, seminars, information material, such as brochures, leaflets, posters, presentations, etc., in electronic form, via traditional or social media, etc.), dissemination activities and any infrastructure, equipment, vehicles, supplies or major result funded through the Programme must acknowledge EU support and display the European flag (emblem) and funding statement “Co-funded with European Union” (translated into local languages, where appropriate).
When displayed in association with other logos (e.g. of beneficiaries or sponsors), the emblem must be displayed at least as prominently and visibly as the other logos. Whenever possible, the EU emblem should also be included in the acknowledgements section of scientific publications. If the policy of a scientific journal does not allow the inclusion of logos, and therefore the EU emblem cannot be displayed, QuantERA may request a short explanation confirming that its inclusion was not permitted.
The acknowledgement to be used in the publications is:
“This work has been supported by QuantERA [insert project acronym], by [insert the funding organisation and the grant number for that funding organisation], [insert the next funding organisation and the grant number for that funding organisation] and co-funded by the European Commission.”
In addition, the QuantERA logo must also be included in publications and visual materials related to the project (e.g. PowerPoint presentations, posters, websites, and other communication and dissemination materials). We also encourage the acknowledgement of the relevant Funding Agencies.
Please note that some Research Funding Organisations may have additional acknowledgement requirements. Individual grants should therefore be acknowledged in accordance with the rules of the respective Funding Agency.
Yes. For monitoring purposes, QuantERA will run two monitoring surveys and require two progress reports of each consortium: one at mid-term and one at the end of the project duration. Both reports will be submitted through the online system. Information in this regard will be provided on an ongoing basis.
Project Coordinators are required to participate in follow-up events organised by QuantERA in order to present the status and results of their projects, exchange experiences with other consortia, and explore opportunities for future collaboration.
QuantERA Consortium considers free online access to the published peer-reviewed articles to be the most effective way of ensuring that the work it supports can be used as the basis for further research.
The project consortia are encouraged to adhere to the Horizon Europe regulation on Open Science provided it is in line with the national/regional requirements of the partners in the project.
The project consortia should agree upon and lay out publishing strategies and Data Management Plans in their Consortium Agreements at the beginning of the project and should aim for Open Access research data and publications, as well as Open Science best practices.
Journal articles should be archived in either institutional or subject-specific repositories. QuantERA recommends repositories registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), such as www.arxiv.org.
Publications shall be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International Public Licence (CC BY) to maximise accessibility and reuse. For monographs and other long-text formats, CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND licenses may be used to exclude commercial uses and derivative works where appropriate. Metadata for all deposited publications shall be openly available under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0).
Research artefacts (data, software, etc.) should be shared on repositories fulfilling the FAIR data principles.
Accordingly, please remember that you will be obligated, during the mid-term and final reporting periods, to submit a complete list of publications resulting from the project along with the respective DOI.
Please use the Data Management Guidelines for QuantERA Research Projects here.
Please note that all activities raising ethical issues should be reported to the QuantERA Programme before their beginning along with:
All partners in the projects must be informed and agree on the changes. The final decision on the changes of PC/PI/institution implementing the project lies within the authority of the respective Research Funding Organization and must be granted formally on the national/ regional level.
Project Coordinator is obliged to notify the Call Secretariat about these changes.
Project consortia may apply for a no-cost extension of their projects. The extension request must be agreed upon by all national Principal Investigators (PIs) and submitted by the Project Coordinator (PC) to the QuantERA Call Secretariat. The requested extension should also be agreed with all respective Funding Organisations. Due to formal requirements connected with QuantERA Programme duration, all projects must conclude no later than 30 November 2029.
