ScienceUs upscaling academy
ScienceUs will launch an open call to select outstanding proposals to upscale citizen science initiatives to other EU regions. The proposals will have to address the challenges related to ‘adaptation to climate change’ identified during the benchmarking period, applicants must be able to justify the impact of their projects on other global challenges or other EU missions.
The selected projects will go through the following phases of the program:
SEED PHASE
SEED PHASE will first consist of attracting potential applicants’ attention to participate in the programme, while the consortium led by the partners and the Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB) will work to identify the Key strategic topics (KSTs) and cooperation scenarios. Based on the results of the benchmarking, a call will be launched in November 2024.
The eligible applicants to the ScienceUs open call will be any EU legal entity with an ongoing citizen science initiative related to adaptation to climate change. The applicants will have to present their needs and an outline of the plan to upscale their initiatives at the EU level.
The evaluation will assess the following criteria: 1) the demand for the project in other regions, 2) the scalability and replicability potential, 3) the applicant’s resources, the strategic fit in view of New ERA and EU Missions and 4) the impact on policies the project may have. A panel of internal and external evaluators (from the stakeholder advisory board) will select the 25 top-ranked citizen science initiatives.
The CS sub-projects will be awarded up to €1,000/project to participate in a 2- day Bootcamp in Berlin (a B2B event with informative sessions about ScienceUs´s expectations, about excellence in CS with training, coaching and a tool kit to help them to prepare the 1st mandatory deliverable « CS transnational campaign and upscaling plan ».
At the end of the phase, the ScienceUs partners will evaluate and select a group of the best 5 initiatives to pass to the next phase. The selection criteria will be based mainly on not only their potential for scaling up to generate networks and communities with other initiatives in Europe’s regions but also on their impact on solving KSTs, their feasibility, capacity to engage all actors from the quadruple helix, the data management plan for sharing open transnational data, sustainability plan and other issues such as their plan for inclusion, gender balance, equity and diversity.
FLOURISH PHASE
FLOURISH PHASE will be the main part of the ScienceUs support program focused on the delivery of end-to-end CS support services to the best 5 citizen science initiatives selected in the previous phase. During this phase, the CS sub-projects will cooperate with other CS initiatives and stakeholders from other EU regions to exchange best practices, share data and draw conclusions from this aggregated data as per their campaign plan handed on the SEED phase. Furthermore, different cooperation scenarios based on the conclusions of benchmarking will be sought in the field of citizen science.
The 5 sub-projects will also enter into the ScienceUs Upscale Academy where they will receive tailored offline and online training and mentoring services in areas such as: 1) Data collection techniques and research data management, 2) Raising additional funds for the CS sub-projects either public (a map of public funds will be developed) and private funding (crowdfunding platforms, donors, industrial sponsorships, donors…); 3) Communication skills and communication strategy, 4) Open Science; 5) Data Management for use of open transnational data repositories and infrastructures (using European repositories such as OpenAire, Zenodo and similar); 6) IP issues; 7) Principles of public engagement and ethics of participation, 8) Linkage and embedding to the research strategies of universities and scientific institutions; 9) Transformative science and scientific excellency, 10) consultancy for regional analysis or capabilities mapping or training in policy development.
During the phase, the CS- sub projects will receive a maximum €25.000/ CS sub-project, lump sum based on the approval of deliverables, level of KPIs achieved and attendance to mandatory events.
HARVEST PHASE
HARVEST PHASE the 5 CS sub-projects will join the ScienceUs quadruple helix test-bed program in which the projects will work with policymakers and public authorities, industry and academia to transform the conclusions from their CS projects into real policy impacts under the new ERA framework and Horizon Europe missions. Also, during this phase, CS sub-projects will have to communicate and disseminate mainly to other similar local initiatives with the aim of generating a spill-over effect of the good citizen science practices from ScienceUs program. To this end, a number of ad-hoc training and mentoring services will be provided to those consortia that enter the Harvest Phase. These services will be: 1) Communication and dissemination of CS results to different audiences, 2) How to generate real impact in policies and regulations (EU strategy and policymaking, 3) How to network and build collaborations to ensure the sustainability of the project. A final payment of €14.000/ project (lump sum scheme) will be released after the approval of the final deliverable.
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