The planned grants are varied and diverse in order to engage diverse stakeholders to be active in and to contribute to EOSC. They will include a focus on disciplinary and domain-specific support, support for RDA / EOSC meetings as well as standards and adoption grants, early career researcher studies and activities, community of practice and domain ambassadors as well as calls for open and community-led technical solutions to maintain and curate RDA outputs within the context of EOSC. The grants range from € 7k  – € 50k depending on the call, the announcements will be multiple and numerous with expected regular calls each month over the duration of the project.

• Have a strong demonstrated expertise in an area relevant to RDA’s mission;
• Have good insights into the European Open Science Cloud or other international open science and research commons developments;
• Be actively involved in RDA as a contributor to a Working Group, Interest Group or some other activity, especially in the past 12 to 18 months;
• Active engagement in RDA plenaries, national, and/or regional workshops is desirable;
• Previous experience as an evaluator (e.g. for the European Commission, other funding bodies / agencies) is desirable;
• Have a good understanding of the European Commission’s processes and procedures, irrespective of affiliation and nationality;
• Applications from beyond Europe are strongly encouraged, reflecting the global mission of RDA;
• Selection of evaluators will include criteria to establish balanced representation: Geographical balance · Gender balance · Domain expertise balance

The call for external expert evaluators to support RDA Open Calls is continuously open during the EOSC Future project. Due to the large number of calls over the next 26 months, some more specific than others, expert evaluators will be identified and selected based on their area of expertise and availability. For this reason, please give as much detail on your expertise and domain area in the application form.

RDA welcomes a diverse set of international expert evaluators. While the actual calls and grant funding will be open to European organisations and individuals only, we encourage applications from expert evaluators from around the world. Requirements to be an evaluator are previous or current active involvement in RDA Working and Interest Groups and expertise in a relevant research area. Knowledge of EOSC is a bonus.

Applicants will ideally have previous experience as an EC or other funding agency evaluator. For cases of non-eligibility, please below read our Guidelines for conflict of interest FAQ

To become a member of the External Pool of Evaluators (EPE), please complete the application form and upload your CV. You will need to have at hand the following documents and links:

• your CV
• a link to your own website, where applicable
• be able to select your domain of expertise within the application form

Your application form should explicitly address your qualifications, and directly reference the relevant aspects of your CV (i.e. make sure to guide us through your CV). You will receive a notification of receipt of your application.

Please also note that in order to proceed with your application you will be asked to register to the EOSC Future Grants website.

We encourage early submissions and your details will be in the system until you are contacted when a relevant call application becomes available.

External evaluators will operate remotely via the EOSC Future Grants Platform and will be responsible for evaluating the applications to cascading grants in response to RDA Europe’s Open Calls. The project aims to have a pool of international external evaluators with differing expertise to enable flexibility when assigning applications. Evaluators will be routinely selected from the pool to ensure that no conflict of interest exists in their duties as evaluators. Consequently, evaluators will be asked to sign a non-conflict of interest and confidentiality agreement, before being accepted to perform their duties.

Evaluators will be given guidelines for evaluation and be expected to review the proposals and complete an assessment form for each based on 5 criteria. Evaluators will have to rank each proposal from 1-10.

For each individual evaluation, the compensation for drafting the individual evaluation report will be €150 (which equals a fixed number of 0.3 working day(s)). In some exceptional cases applications may require more time and experts will be notified in writing of this when contacted for evaluation duties.

• Staff working on the EOSC Future project (i.e. directly funded through a beneficiary (it's department or unit executing EOSC Future activities), as an LTP or seconded personnel) are not eligible to apply for grants under the RDA Open Calls and will be asked to tick a Declaration of Honour box upon application. Other staff of these participating institutions are eligible.
• If the evaluator’s institution applies for an RDA Open Call, the evaluator should declare their conflict of interest in reviewing the application. Evaluators will be asked to sign a non-conflict of interest agreement before being accepted to perform their duties for a specific RDA Open Call evaluation. A conflict of interest exists if an evaluator: (a) was involved in any way in the preparation of the proposal or submitted the proposal itself (b) stands to benefit directly or indirectly if the proposal is accepted (c) has a close family or personal relationship with the applicant or the applicant's organisation (d) is a director, trustee or partner or is in any way involved in the management of the applicant's organisation (e) is employed or contracted by one of the applicant's organisation or any named subcontractors (f) has submitted a proposal for the same domain and in response to the same call.

RDA (Research Data Alliance) is a bottom-up, international organisation with multi-disciplinary and multi-domain data experts collaborating to identify and create research data interoperability solutions, and provides a neutral forum for the creation of open, international agreements on technical, social, and governance focusing on data and related services. RDA in EOSC Future will act as a community enabler by leveraging on its global perspective and reach, and will advocate for and support open science, open research, and open data. Additionally it will engage with research communities that are not traditionally represented by research infrastructures and clusters.