ANR turns to Europe

By Mercè Guzmán Vendrell, Project Manager – GO 

Europe’s in the spotlight and the September ANR webinars are back!  

Last July the ANR published its 2026 Action Plan. One of its main goals is to reinforce the link with Horizon Europe. To this end, three new measures will be implemented in the 2026 Action Plan:  

1. Project leaders of PRCI (international collaborative research projects) will now be able to directly access the MRSEI program (European or international scientific networking) program, without going through a dedicated call for projects.  

2. Young researchers involved in a JCJC project (young researchers projects) will be able to benefit from a lump-sum funding of €75,000 to prepare an ERC application.  

3. The ERC Springboard program (Tremplin ERC), previously available for Starting and Consolidator applicants, is now open to Advanced Grants. This extension aims to support excellent yet unsuccessful ERC applicants in improving their proposals and submitting a new application.  

In addition, the 2026 Action Plan also introduces concrete measures to facilitate collaborations with companies:  

• Collaborative projects with companies (PRCE) will directly advance to stage 2 of the AAPG.  

• The ANR support rate for SMEs has been increased from 45% to 60%;  

• The threshold for companies applying to the Industrial Chairs call has been lowered from €500,000 to €400,000 to encourage wider applications.  

These adjustments aim to foster collaborative research across sectors and further align with the objectives of Horizon Europe.  

The 38 scientific axes of the 2026 ANR generic call are structured into 7 disciplinary fields. On top of those 19 transversal axes, covering issues spanning over the 7 scientific fields, cover important topics like “One Health” and the the “Ecological and Environmental transition”. The ANR prepared detailed presentations for each one of the axes and they can all be found here. 

You can consult the full 2026 Action Plan here.  

ANR September Webinars will be available upon registration. 

Once again, you can watch live or recorded versions of the ANR webinars series. A total of 13 webinars discussing the changes made in the 2026 action plan, open-science policy, and public-private partnerships amongst other subjects will be available. The whole program and registration link are to be found here.  

The Gonational team will communicate to the campus about these events soon.