Call for proposals

A call bundles one or more topics under a shared deadline and a shared set of conditions. The call carries the closing date and the general rules; each topic carries its own scope, its own budget and its own expected number of grants. This is why two topics published under the same call can offer completely different odds, and why Bemzu treats the topic rather than the call as the thing you apply to.

Calls are competitive and one-shot. There is no negotiation before the deadline, no partial submission, no supplementary annex sent afterwards. What sits in the submission system at the cut-off is what gets evaluated, and the clock is 17:00:00 Brussels time on the closing date, not midnight, not your local time. The system closes on the second.

Admissibility is checked before anything is read. A proposal must be complete, readable, and within the page limit: 45 pages for a research or innovation action, 30 for a coordination and support action, 10 for the first stage of a two-stage call. Excess pages are not penalised by the evaluators; they are removed before the evaluators see them, and a watermark warns that everything past the limit was disregarded. People lose their conclusions this way.

Two shapes exist. A single-stage call asks for the full proposal at once. A two-stage call asks for a short outline first, invites perhaps a third of applicants to submit in full, and moves the real work several months later, worth knowing before you commit a team to a proposal that is due in ten days.

Some calls run with several CUT-OFF DATES against one budget rather than a single deadline. Submitting to an early cut-off is not a soft option: each cut-off is judged on its own, and a late one may be competing for whatever money the earlier rounds left behind.