Results of first IST call for proposals
A total of 2519 proposals have been received by the European Commission in response to the User Friendly Information Society (IST) programme's first call for proposals under the Fifth Framework Programme. Of these 555 proposals were retained for negotiation for a total budget of 930 million euros, with a further 64 proposals kept in reserve. This represents a success rate of more than one in five proposals, while the successful projects will receive around one-sixth of the total funding applied for. The proposals received comprised 2347 research proposals for the fixed deadline of 16 June 1999, and 172 received (up to 1 July) under continuous submission for the future and emerging technologies open scheme, SME awards, Marie Curie industrial host fellowships, and accompanying measures. A representative of the Commission's Information Society Directorate-General said the response was good, covering all areas well, with proposals on average of high quality. The received proposals were fairly evenly spread across the four Key Actions of the IST programme. However the quality of proposals was higher under the Key Action for 'Essential technologies and infrastructures', reflected in the fact that almost double the number of proposals were retained for negotiation than for any other Key Action. Proposals were weakest in application-oriented areas where it appeared that the criteria of innovation and exploitation of results were poorly understood. Sources in the Commission said a lot of proposals aiming at service and application development scored low on these criteria. The Commission intends to tighten up its definitions of these concepts in the second call for proposals and make information available as to what is meant in order to strengthen calls in the future. As with all EU research programmes, cross-border cooperation is a fundamental element. This first round of calls resulted in a total of 18,000 participants, well spread over the EU and associated countries. The response from the Central and Eastern European countries which have recently signed up to the Fifth Framework Programme was enthusiastic, but Commission sources said several measures need to be enforced to improve the number and quality of participations. These include extending research networks to these countries, establishing channels of information dissemination and encouraging other European researchers to take partners from the East. The second call for proposals opened on 1 October 1999, and for RTD proposals the deadline is 16 January 2000.