Opportunità di finanziamento - Open call

The European Commission has adopted the European Research Council (ERC) Work Programme 2027 setting out the funding opportunities, grant budgets, competition timetable and application rules for the coming year. 

Established by the ERC Scientific Council and formally adopted by the Commission, the Work Programme introduces a few changes to the ERC's grant schemes and application rules that were announced earlier this year to give researchers time to prepare.

Among the key changes are broader eligibility windows for Starting and Consolidator Grants, as well as limits on the number of proposals researchers may submit under a single work programme. The changes aim to reflect increasingly diverse research careers while helping to maintain a fair and efficient evaluation process.  

The first competition under the new Work Programme will be the ERC Starting Grant 2027 call, which opens on 22 July 2026. It will be followed by the other ERC grant competitions: Consolidator Grant, Synergy Grant, Advanced Grant as well as the ERC Plus Grant.

MSCA COFUND co-finances new or existing doctoral programmes and postdoctoral fellowship schemes with the aim of spreading the best practices of the MSCA including international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary research training, as well as international and cross-sectoral mobility of researchers at all stages of their career.

In practice, MSCA COFUND provides complementary funding for doctoral or postdoctoral programmes managed by entities established in EU Member States or Horizon Europe Associated Countries. Those co-funded programmes must follow MSCA’s good practice in terms of international recruitment and minimum standard of employment for the recruited fellows as described in the European Charter for Researchers.

MSCA Choose Europe for Science co-funded programmes additionally aim to address brain drain and precarity of researchers' careers in order to make Europe more attractive to the most promising young talents. The scheme will allow applicants to link MSCA grants to competitions leading to long-term attractive positions in universities and other research performing organisations.

Expected impact

Proposals under this Action should contribute to the following expected impacts:

   Enhance talent and knowledge circulation across the R&I landscape, through international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary mobility, including by supporting regional or national smart specialisation strategies when appropriate;
   Align practices with MSCA policies based on the European Charter for Researchers;
   Improve the attractiveness of researchers’ careers notably through better working and employment conditions as well as access to concrete long-term career prospects;
   Strengthen Europe's human capital base in R&I by training highly-skilled researchers;
   Increase Europe's attractiveness as a leading R&I destination;
   Enhance the quality of R&I contributing to Europe's sustainable competitiveness;
   Establish sustainable collaboration between academic and non-academic organisations;
   Foster the culture of open science, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The project will support the development of a modular, trustworthy and interoperable AI-enabled infrastructure enabling pan-European public-interest media platform(s) to make available real time news and information from professional media outlets across the EU and associated countries to wider audiences[1]. It will harness AI to translate, process and distribute content for relevant channels through classification, recognition, linguistic analysis, translation and other multimodal workflows. It will also enable prototypic content creation and testing of immersive and innovation-inspired media experiences consistent with a public-interest mission for different age groups, taking into account gender-responsive design and  promoting news diversity. Overall, it will improve multilingual access, including low-resource European languages, strengthen media pluralism and resilience for public service media and professional media outlets, content creators and independent publishers, and embed trust, provenance and accountability by design.

The concrete expected outcomes are:

   Reliable, modular and interoperable infrastructure with validated service levels and sustainability pathways, integrating AI-based components that support multilingual and multimodal media workflows including audiovisual processing and adaptation workflows, relevant metadata interoperability for broadcast and streaming contexts, social-media-facing interaction and adaptive, personalised, and interactive content experiences (modular journalism) catering for diverse user needs.
   Content in multiple languages and onboarding conditions and equal access for all types of media organisations, from public broadcasters to small local publishers, SMEs, cultural institutions and civil society groups.
   Built-in safety, transparency and governance features, fair human-data interactions (e.g., legibility, agency, negotiability), traceability of key decisions, open evaluation methods, and validated governance and interoperability frameworks.
   Reliable tracking of content origins through provenance information, attribution metadata and verification signals.

Scope:

This topic will support pilots for AI-enabled media infrastructures, fostering research and innovation in the European media sector. It should deliver innovative solutions by consolidating, integrating and validating reusable AI-enabled infrastructure components and governance arrangements of platform pilots[2] for pan-European public-interest media platform(s), making use, where appropriate, of European AI infrastructure and building on results from relevant Horizon Europe, Digital Europe and pilot actions, in preparation for wider scale-up from 2028 onward. The action will encourage the development, testing and improvement of innovative solutions that respond to the needs of the media ecosystem. Proposals should integrate and scale up relevant results and move existing pilots towards operational validation in real-word conditions against declared service levels, including appropriate resilience, lifecycle-managed storage, a KPI framework and independent evaluation, in line with Union standards, and observability, traceability and content provenance by design. AI components should follow transparent and accountable practices, including documentation, explainability, logging and evaluation, to enable audit, redress and effective oversight.

The project should demonstrate a credible pathway towards broad European language coverage, accessibility and support for relevant emerging formats, with a credible post-grant sustainability approach and, where relevant, onboarding, training and pilot cohorts. It should foster participation of media organisations by addressing industry needs, including bridging tools and common formats linking editorial workflows and platform technologies (e.g. ingestion, aggregation, curation, metadata exchange, rights and licensing parameters, attribution and provenance information). The project should present a mechanism to bring together public and private media outlets and publishers, broadcasters, AI and language-technology providers, platform developers, content creators and social media actors, fact-checking and integrity actors, and rights-management organisations. Where relevant, cultural and heritage institutions and civil society organisations should also be involved. The infrastructure should test advanced open APIs solutions and demonstrate their technical viability. Moreover, the infrastructure should provide SDKs and documentation to enable integration with multiple front ends and third-party environments, onboarding pathways for smaller players, and where relevant, open-source development approaches. This includes social-media-facing interaction and referral functions, and, AI companion-style interactions via an API. Collective contextualisation services, facilitation of user onboarding and support for cooperation, the embedding of robust provenance safeguards for synthetic or manipulated content with clear redress paths and where relevant, cooperation with fact-checking and integrity actors, may equally be considered. The project should contribute to an existing or establish a structured multi-stakeholder governance framework including structured exchanges with relevant stakeholders and related initiatives through an appropriate coordination mechanism.

Technology Readiness Level - Technology readiness level expected from completed projects

Activities are expected to start at TRL 6 and achieve TRL 8 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

[1] COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL Apply AI Strategy, 2.10. Cultural and creative sectors, and media;
Communication on the European Democracy Shield

[2] Such as “Supporting multilingual access to trusted news and public-interest information across Europe”

The main objective of this call is to develop employees’ involvement in undertakings by raising awareness and contributing to the application of European Union law and policies in this area. The call aims at supporting projects which seek to help accompany through social dialogue at company level the significant changes driven by industry transitions and, in particular, the take-up and effective functioning of European Works Councils. The call shall focus on one or a limited number of topical challenges with a view to maximise both the individual and aggregated impact of the selected projects.

Scope:

Actions to promote European level and strengthened transnational cooperation between social partners that address the following themes would be expected:

- to promote exchange and wider dissemination of knowledge and good practices and to launch actions aimed at supporting the setting up and good functioning of European Works Councils, including the promotion of gender balanced European Works Councils;

- to support workers’ involvement in the anticipation and management of change and the prevention and resolution of disputes in the event of various forms of restructuring in EU level undertakings and groups of undertakings, as required to achieve a just transition, i.e. address challenges brought by the pursuit of EU’s climate objectives (e.g. Council recommendation of 16 June 20225 on ensuring a fair transition towards climate neutrality), and by the digital transformation of economies (e.g. impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on work organisation or working conditions).