The HERA JRP UP partners jointly defined and developed a common research priority, opened a transnational funding mechanism and pooled a substantial amount of their funding in one virtual pot. The HERA JRP UP Board was the main decision-making body regarding matters such as the financing of the HERA JRP UP projects, Knowledge Transfer Strategy and its implementation, and monitoring of the HERA JRP UP funded projects. The HERA JRP UP partners contracted the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research to act as the HERA JRP UP Handling Agency for the first phase of the programme (e.g. organising the call and selection process). For the second phase of the programme the IRC was contracted as the HERA JRP UP Handling Agency (i.e. for managing the HERA JRP UP funded projects and networking activities).
The Call was open to scholars located in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, irrespective of their nationality. Successful proposals required the building of consortia of four or more partners based in four or more different HERA JRP UP countries. The total amount of funding available for the transnational research projects funded in the HERA JRP UP theme was 21,7 M€, 4 M€ of which was the Cofund. Most participating countries also made a provisional additional 25% reservation to their original commitment to guarantee that a reasonable number of projects could be funded. In addition 0,7 M€ was contributed by the HERA JRP UP partners for the handling costs of the selection procedure and the management costs of the projects.
The projects were considered to be highly successful, both in their efforts to generate meaningful transnational humanities research, but also in their efforts to disseminate these results. Their individual results and subsequent evaluations can be found in Deliverable 5.5 and 5.6. respectively.
The HERA JRP created a HERA Vision and Strategy, to generate a unified response to the challenges presented by this transnational cooperation. Within this Vision, HERA defined its mission and core working principles and set out a course of action for the next years. This course of action specified a far broader spectrum of activities for the HERA network than the initially planned focus on “embedding” as set out in the application for the Cofund HERA Joint Research Programme “Uses of the Past”. To keep in line with the HERA Vision, the network’s action plan was modified and changed from a narrower focus on the integration of the humanities (and social sciences) in the European Research Area to a wider strategic orientation tackling funding calls, advocacy, impact and knowledge exchange and organisational challenges.
HERA scoped out members’ interest in developing the portfolio of funding activities either by additional joint bi- or multilateral calls as well as their interest in joining forces with other funders or funders’ networks – with or without EC funding. This was implemented through a scoping exercise in 2017/2018 (see D8.6 “Report on evaluation/future areas”), continuous discussion throughout the bi-annual Board Meetings of HERA, a dedicated Workshop on prioritization (Madrid, 6/2018) and contact to other potential funders and networks.
Finally, DLR-PT coordinated the additional activities targeting at strategy development for embedding humanities in the ERA and at signposting opportunities for humanities researchers.
One example would be the “Early Career Researchers Event”. This was organised by the Knowledge Exchange fellows in 2018 in Slovakia. As a follow-up to that, the Early Career Researcher Network was launched at the HERA conference in Gdansk (10.-11.09.2019) which united ECRs from the HERA Joint Research Programmes “Uses of the Past” and “Public Spaces”.
