Collaboration agreements

• Read more about roles and responsibilities in projects with partners for those who apply in the new application system (link to come).
• Read more about roles and responsibilities in projects with partners for those who apply in the old application system.

R&D providers and other providers are not partners in the project. These deliver goods and services to the Project Owner's organisation and/or partners.

Read more about R&D providers and subcontractors.  

The collaboration agreement shall regulate the mutual rights and obligations of the Project Owner and the partners in a project. We set certain requirements for collaboration agreements, including how ownership and rights to project results are to be regulated in a collaboration agreement.

The requirements are based on:

• The Research Council's rights policy (PDF)
• section Ownership, exploitation rights and licensing in the General Terms and Conditions for R&D Projects (PDF)

The parties are to draw up the agreements themselves

It is up to the parties to find a format and content of the cooperation agreement that suits them and the project in question. To help, we have made some examples of cooperation agreements that can be used as a starting point.

See examples of cooperation agreements

In the example agreements below, we use the term "R&D contract". The term includes the agreement document (the agreement entered into between the Research Council and the Project Owner), the project description, the Research Council's general terms and conditions for R&D projects and any agreed supplementary documents.

Where funding has been applied for through the Research Council's new application system (My page), no such contract will be entered into. Instead, you will receive a grant letter. In the grant letter, you will find the actual decision on the grant and all the terms and conditions for you to be paid the grant. Read more about the grant letter.

In collaboration agreements and/or consortium agreements for projects that have received funding through the new application system, "R&D contract" must therefore be replaced with "grant letter".  

Three-month deadline

The collaboration agreements must be entered into and confirmed on My page by the parties no later than three months after we have sent the grant letter to the Project Owner organisation. (For the project on an old system, the signed contract must be uploaded to My RCN web no later than three months after the Project Owner has been sent it).

Go to the login page.

Collaboration agreements must be confirmed/uploaded before we can disburse funds to the project.

Change partners after the project has received a grant letter

The partners' expertise and participation play an important role in assessing the quality of a project and may have been decisive in the decision to award funding. The Research Council therefore considers partners to be so important for the implementation of a project that we must give our consent before the partners can be changed.

If you want to change partners after you have received a grant decision, you can do this in the start-up process (link to come) or later in an application for project change (link to come).

Any approval of a change of partners will require you to amend the cooperation agreement.