Third-party Call #1
Update per December 1st, 2023: Call 1 was closed on 28th of April 2023. In November 2023 OWS.EU successfully onboarded six third-parties. Read more here
Starting with this first third-party call, the OpenWebSearch.eu Community Programme is coming to life in spring 2023.
The OpenWebSearch.eu project consortium aims to integrate new third-party project teams into the OpenWebSearch.eu landscape and to integrate them into future sustainable R&D activities.
Dates and Modalities
Opening date: 1st March 2023
Closing date: 28th of April 2023, 17:00
Notification date: 30th June 2023
Start of projects: 1st August 2023
Possible funding: 25,000 – 120,000 EUR
What?
Third-party projects should explore closely related topics of the project. They should aim to extend and enrich the existing R&D activities and propose new ones that complement the project objectives.
Successful applicants will conceptually support the development of the platform as well as contribute with concept studies on the legally compliant gathering of web data and metadata.
Who?
In particular, we are targeting smaller companies (e.g. SMEs, start-ups), individual innovators, individual researchers or research teams (e.g. doctoral or post-doctoral researchers) from renowned universities.
Eligible applicants are individuals residing in EU Member States or Horizon Europe Associated Countries, or organisations registered in EU Member States or Horizon Europe Associated Countries.
Third-party Funding
Successful applications can request funding between 25,000 and 120,000 EUR in this first call for a funding period of up to 12 months.
Call topics
OpenWebSearch.eu aims at building and piloting a legally compliant Open Web Index as a European infrastructure. The first OpenWebSearch.eu call asks for contributions in legally compliant data gathering and in identifying legal or economic aspects that enable or block the development and maintenance of an Open Web Index.
We call for contributions in form of research studies on legal or economic aspects of Open Search (Track 1) as well as on concepts for legally compliant data acquisition, processing, considering also societal constraints (Track 2). Each track poses a set of concrete questions which should be addressed by applications.
Track #1
Conceptual contributions on legal or economic aspects of Open Search
Building an Open Web Index (OWI) does not only include technical challenges, but also legal and societal ones, especially when considering recent EU legislation like the Digital Service Act or the Digital Market Act. Furthermore, challenges for new business models or significant changes in the search engine market arise. The consortium seeks for two possible kinds of studies:
Legal Studies to analyse and understand legal constraints and requirements for building and operating an OWI, which includes, but is not limited to (i) compilation and analysis of the laws and norms that are relevant to building and maintaining an OWI, (ii) legal assessment of technical and non-technical prevention mechanism, (iii) legal assessment of the implications of the right to de-referencing for an OWI or (iv) analysis of existing open source and open data licenses in regard to the suitability for usage in an OWI.
Economic Studies for setting up and maintaining an OWI as public European infrastructure. This includes, but is not limited to studies for analysing and estimating the costs associated with setting up, operating and maintaining a distributed open web index infrastructure across Europe and analysing and estimating the market potential and economic impact of such an infrastructure.
Track #2
Technical approaches to legally compliant data acquisition considering societal constraints
Web crawling is the predominant method for web search engines to gather content for their index. However, webmaster and content owners have only limited control over the crawling process via mostly proprietary services.
OpenWebSearch.eu is looking for concepts and approaches for opening up the proprietary components and provide webmasters and content owners with more control over the crawling process and the usage of their content.
Envisioned solutions should be technical in nature, including
- new metadata schemata/ontologies,
- algorithms/services for collecting website metadata,
- services and tools for webmaster and content owners to define legal constraints for crawling as well as
- open datasets and machine learning models for analysing and filtering web pages during the crawling process.
Target Audience
The calls target especially smaller companies (i.e., SMEs, start-ups), individual innovators, individual researchers or research teams (e.g., doctoral or post-doctoral researchers). Especially for the technically oriented calls (Track 2), the consortium will provide necessary information and training material and support as well as the necessary documentation of the on-boarding and governance process.
The eligible applicants for this opportunity are either:
- Individuals who are citizens or residents of any EU Member State or any of the countries associated with Horizon Europe; or
- Organizations that are registered in any EU Member State or any of the countries associated with Horizon Europe.
Please note that the list of associated countries may change over time, and it is recommended to check the latest list of eligible countries before applying.
The third-party calls particularly focus on the following categories of applicants:
- Academic researchers and research groups in universities or research centres or R&D focused organisations;
- Renowned experts, individuals and scholars or associations;
- High-tech start-ups, SMEs, or industry with a focus on Web technology or software development
- Outstanding individual open-source innovators/researchers and experienced individual developers/researchers;
- Other multidisciplinary actors.
Applications can also involve teams of different organisations or teams of natural persons. In case of team applications (i.e., multiple natural persons without an organisational entities or multiple organisational entities), one team member must take the role of main contact point and legally responsible party.
Submission procedure
The applicants have to submit their appropriately formatted proposal by email to the call management by the given deadline. Please use the proposal template for applications. Applicants can submit at most one application per call. English is the main language for communication with the OpenWebSearch.eu consortium, and all submitted documents must be written in English.
The submission will be acknowledged by the call management, and, only after the confirmation, the proposal can be considered as being submitted. It is advised not to wait till the last moment with the submission. Note that multiple submissions of the same project are not accepted. If the submission is not confirmed within max. 2 days, and provided the call deadline has not yet passed, you may contact the Grantor at call1@openwebsearch.eu to request the information and ask for re-submission
Get the Call Package here
The package consists of two documents: The information for applicants and the proposal template.
- The “Information for applicants” contains all information about the call, the procedures and the application process as well as the legal information.
- The “Proposal Template” contains the actual application form. For full functionality, open this proposal template in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Contact
If you have further questions on the application procedure and third-party call related activities of OpenWebSearch.eu project, feel free to contact us.
Administrative contact
Informal inquiries
