During the reporting period, from 01/12/2017 to 30/11/2023, 4 calls have been managed at different stages, thus covering 8 topics: Call 2016, Call 2017, Call 2018 and Call 2019.
CHIST‐ERA has thus successfully anchored the initiative in the portfolio of activities of its consortium members, acting as an operational platform for research funding organisations willing to co‐operate in the area of ICST to leverage the impact of the FET programme of the European Commission.
Each call is published within a relatively short timeframe of less than twelve months after the topics selection to maintain a high level of relevance of the calls in very competitive evolving ICST areas which need reactivity.
The success of the calls in terms of number of proposals submitted since the first call (393 - approx. 50 per call) and the total volume of funding requested (366 M€ - approx. 0.9-1 M€ per proposal) indicates the high expectations of the scientific community for such a novel approach targeting high‐risk, high‐impact focused research topics.
In addition to implementing joint calls, it is part of CHIST‐ERA’s mission to follow the progress of the funded projects. For this purpose, the funded projects produce a yearly activity report and need to attend the yearly CHISTERA projects seminar where they present their results. These are assessed by experts in order to provide a comprehensive vision of the scientific results. These experts thus contribute to produce an overall assessment and a portfolio analysis of CHIST‐ERA.
During the lifetime of CHIST-ERA III, 4 Projects Seminars were organized. During the Project Seminar 2019, a new topic of interest to the CHIST-ERA research communities emerged: open science. The ERA-NET served as a springboard for developing a concrete open science policy within the framework of CHIST-ERA IV.
As part of the project, the funding organisations in CHIST‐ERA worked since the beginning of the CHIST‐ERA I ERA‐NET to ensure the sustainability of the network. CHIST‐ERA is open to new funding organisations, and in parallel is interacting at different levels with sister initiatives and in particular the FLAG‐ERA and QuantERA ERA‐NETs.
As a consequence of the attractiveness of past calls and of a proactive approach to convince new funding organisations in Europe to join the consortium, the number of partners in CHIST‐ERA has been constantly growing with currently 32 partners on board, to be compared to 9 at the beginning of CHIST‐ERA I. This has also motivated new countries in Europe and beyond to join the ERA-NET CHIST-ERA IV, the follow-up to CHIST-ERA III.
