The National Contact Points (NCPs) play an important role in assisting potential applicants and project beneficiaries during their journey through the Horizon 2020 instruments. According to the EC Guide on the NCPs principles, they are responsible for raising awareness about available funding opportunities; advising and training potential applicants in the preparation, submission and follow-up of their grant proposals; providing support during the project execution as well as giving feedback on difficulties in the programme implementation. Thus, the NCPs constitute the main interface between the Programme and the R&I community in Europe and beyond, as well as between them and the EC. Basing on such a position, Net4Mobility+ aims at strengthening the consistency and professionalism of the NCPs for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – part of H2020 supporting international and intersectoral mobility and researchers’ career development. The consortium of 19 beneficiaries and 6 associated partners representing the Member States, Associated and Third countries will execute a set of activities tailored to the nature of MSCA and to priorities and capacity of the entire NCPs network, including needs of the “widening countries”. The focus on sharing expertise and good practices, transfer of knowledge to less experienced NCPs, joint support provided on a daily basis, enhancing knowledge and skills, broadening tools and methodology will facilitate the improvement of the overall professionalism of NCP services across and outside Europe. Outcomes of project events (training, twinning, seminars), jointly developed materials (guides, recommendations) and communication and dissemination platform (website, social media) will result in lowering entry barriers for newcomers, simplifying access to MSCA calls and raising the quality of applications. For reaching the project objectives and ensuring the impact, the consortium will work closely, keeping high management and quality standards.

EU-LAC ResInfra will identify a number of Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) Research Infrastructures (RIs) that may be considered eligible for the construction of a bi-regional collaboration. This will be carried out through the definition of minimal key requirements these RIs would need to develop in the coming years. To this aim, the Project will build on the prioritisation results of the EU-CELAC Senior Official Meeting on Science and Technology (SOM) Working Group (WG) on Research Infrastructures (RI) and, more specifically, will take as a reference the mapping exercises developed in previous EU funded projects. In addition, EU-LAC ResInfra will develop a map of National and Regional Research Infrastructure policies, and their corresponding strategies and plans, including funding mechanisms that might be used to support the construction and operation of future EU-LAC RIs. Furthermore, EU-LAC ResInfra will use all the results and information obtained for drafting a Sustainability Plan, which will be presented to the EU-CELAC WG RI for discussion and endorsement. The Plan will include specific actions to support the bi-regional collaboration in a mid-term perspective. The objectives are to design specific variable geometry instruments for co-funding RIs of common interest, and to design measures that pursue the strengthening of the bi-regional RI cooperation, seeking to maximise the impact of the RI collaboration in the construction of the EU-CELAC Common Research Area. Finally, the Project aims to show the feasibility of the EU-LAC RI collaboration through existing examples, thanks to the development of four Pilots in different scientific domains that are linked to some existing Research Infrastructures: INSTRUCT-ERIC, LIFEWATCH-ERIC, E-RIHS and RICAP.