European Partnerships: Horizon Europe funding for Joint Undertakings must focus on research

A key message concerns the division of funding responsibilities between Horizon Europe and the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF). While European Partnerships, including Joint Undertakings, may contribute to the entire research-to-deployment continuum, this should not mean that all stages are financed through Horizon Europe, as the consultation questions suggest.

Horizon Europe funding should focus on research and innovation, prioritising activities at low and medium technology readiness levels. Industrial scale-up, deployment and market uptake should be supported through the ECF or other appropriate instruments. These responsibilities must be clearly defined from the outset and reflected in the programming and financing of partnerships. This would ensure continuity between research, deployment and market uptake without diverting resources from Horizon Europe's R&I mission.

European Partnerships must also complement, rather than replace, open collaborative research. As such, EUA calls for the majority of Pillar II funding to remain allocated to actions outside European Partnerships, as in the current programme. This safeguard should be maintained in the FP10 legal basis to ensure that open, competitive and collaborative calls continue to play a central role.

In addition, EUA welcomes the intention to rationalise the partnership landscape but cautions against creating overly large and complex structures. Mergers should be pursued where they bring clear added value, while the application of sunset clauses should be strengthened. Simplification should translate into more transparent and accessible participation conditions, particularly for universities and newcomers, rather than only reducing the number of partnerships.

Finally, in its response to the consultation's questions on the thematic partnership portfolio, EUA highlights the European Partnership for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as a particularly valuable initiative at the European level. The EOSC Partnership provides a strategic advantage that cannot be achieved as effectively through fragmented national actions.  

EOSC is the perfect example of what UNESCO calls an “essential research infrastructure, governed and owned by the community and funded collectively by governments, funders and institutions reflecting the diverse interests and needs of the research community and society”. This is because it:

• brings distributed nationally and community-owned resources together into an interoperable research commons while preserving ownership and autonomy;
• enables long-term, secure, and trustworthy access to high-quality findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) research data,
• strengthens reproducibility and cross-border collaboration; and
• helps to ensure that Europe can develop and control the infrastructures, data, and standards that underpin future R&I activities.

For these reasons, EUA calls for the EOSC Partnership to be retained as a distinct partnership in the future European Partnerships portfolio, with its own dedicated work programme to ensure strategic coherence and continuity of support.