A consortium of the OpenWebSearch.EU project formed by 14 research partners is open for third-party proposals to help building an Open and independent Web Index based on European values. The first call addresses business and research partners to submit their applications in two tracks until 28 April 2023.

In particular, the call targets SMEs or start-ups, individual innovators and researchers or research teams. Third-party candidates should drive research closely related to the topics addressed in the project. Moreover, they should aim to enrich the existing R&D activities and suggest new ones in line with the project goals and aims.

The project consortium calls for contributions in two tracks:
Track 1 includes studies on legal or economic aspects of Open Search. This covers topics, such as legal constraints and requirements of crawling, storing, enriching or sharing web data, but also the analysis of the cost-benefit of an Open Web Index infrastructure across Europe or of market potential and economic impact.

Track 2 calls for technical concepts for legally compliant data acquisition and processing, considering also societal constraints. This includes contributions, such as vocabularies, metadata schemata or ontologies for expressing/defining legal constraints on web page usage, open datasets, and machine learning models for analysing web pages.

In this first call of three, successful applications can request funding between 25,000 and 120,000 EUR for a period of up to 12 months. Members of the consortium as well as external experts, will review the applications. Eligible are individuals and organisations residing in EU member states or Horizon Europe-associated countries. The third-party projects will be funded under OpenWebSearch.eu Community Program. All awardees will be an essential part of ongoing and future R&D activities of the Open Web Search Community.

Detailed information and application can be found here.

Open call details:
Closing date: 28 April 2023, 17:00
Notification date: 30 June 2023
Start of projects: 1 August 2023
Possible funding: EUR 25,000 – 120,000