Funding Opportunities - 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 several changes to the ERC's grant schemes and application procedures, which were announced earlier this year in order to give researchers time to prepare.

Key changes include expanded eligibility periods for Starting and Consolidator Grants, as well as limits on the number of proposals researchers can submit within a single work programme. These changes are intended to better reflect increasingly diverse research careers and to help ensure a fair and efficient evaluation process.

The first call under the new Work Programme will be the ERC Starting Grant 2027 call, opening on 22 July 2026. This will be followed by competitions for the Consolidator Grant, Synergy Grant, Advanced Grant and ERC Plus Grant.

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

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. These co-funded programmes must adhere to MSCA’s best practices regarding international recruitment and the minimum standard of employment for recruited fellows, as outlined in the European Charter for Researchers.

MSCA Choose Europe for Science co-funded programmes also aim to address brain drain and the precarity of researchers' careers, in order to make Europe more attractive to the most promising young talents. The scheme enables applicants to connect 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 a 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 provide real-time news and information from professional media outlets across the EU and associated countries to broader audiences[1]. It will leverage AI for translating, processing, and distributing content across relevant channels through classification, recognition, linguistic analysis, translation, and other multimodal workflows. Additionally, it will facilitate prototype content creation and the testing of immersive and innovative media experiences aligned with a public-interest mandate for different age groups, taking into account gender-responsive design and promoting news diversity. Overall, it will enhance multilingual access, including for low-resource European languages, strengthen media pluralism and resilience for public service 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 sustainable pathways, integrating AI-based components to support multilingual and multimodal media workflows, including audiovisual processing and adaptation, relevant metadata interoperability for broadcast and streaming scenarios, social-media-facing interaction, and adaptive, personalized, and interactive content experiences (modular journalism) to meet diverse user needs.
   Content available in multiple languages and equal onboarding conditions and access for all types of media organizations, 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), leveraging, where appropriate, European AI infrastructure and building on results from relevant Horizon Europe, Digital Europe, and pilot actions, preparing for broader scaling from 2028 onward. The action will support the development, testing, and improvement of innovative solutions that meet the needs of the media ecosystem. Proposals should integrate and scale up relevant results, moving existing pilots toward operational validation in real-world conditions against declared service levels, including suitable resilience, lifecycle-managed storage, a KPI framework, and independent evaluation, in line with Union standards, as well as observability, traceability, and content provenance by design. AI components should adhere to transparent and accountable practices, including documentation, explainability, logging, and evaluation, to allow for audit, redress, and effective oversight.

The project should demonstrate a credible pathway toward broad European language coverage, accessibility, and support for relevant emerging formats, with a sound post-grant sustainability strategy and, where relevant, onboarding, training, and pilot cohorts. It should encourage participation of media organizations by addressing industry needs, including bridging tools and common formats connecting editorial workflows and platform technologies (e.g., ingestion, aggregation, curation, metadata exchange, rights and licensing parameters, attribution, and provenance information). The project should offer 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 agents, and rights-management organizations. Where relevant, cultural and heritage institutions and civil society organizations should also be involved. The infrastructure should test advanced open API solutions and demonstrate their technical viability. Furthermore, 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 functionalities, as well as AI companion-style interactions via an API. Collective contextualization services, facilitation of user onboarding, and support for collaboration, embedding robust provenance safeguards for synthetic or manipulated content with clear redress mechanisms, and, where relevant, cooperation with fact-checking and integrity agents, may also be considered. The project should contribute to an existing, or establish a new, 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 reach TRL 8 by the project’s end – 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 enhance employee involvement in enterprises by increasing awareness and contributing to the implementation of European Union law and policies in this area. The call aims to support projects that facilitate, through social dialogue at company level, significant changes resulting from industrial transitions, with particular attention to the establishment and effective operation of European Works Councils. The call will focus on one or a limited number of topical challenges in order to maximise both the individual and collective impact of the selected projects.

Scope:

Actions aimed at promoting European-level and strengthened transnational cooperation between social partners addressing the following themes are expected:

- Promoting the exchange and broader dissemination of knowledge and best practices, and launching initiatives to support the establishment and proper functioning of European Works Councils, including the promotion of gender-balanced European Works Councils;

- Supporting worker involvement in the anticipation and management of change, as well as the prevention and resolution of disputes in the context of various forms of restructuring in EU-level enterprises and groups of undertakings, as required to ensure a just transition. This includes addressing challenges associated with the pursuit of the EU’s climate objectives (e.g. Council recommendation of 16 June 2022 on ensuring a fair transition towards climate neutrality), and the digital transformation of economies (e.g. the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on work organisation or working conditions).