Euresearch Lausanne and SCIPROM co-organise an info event on the FP7 ICT call 3 taking place at EPFL on 22 Jan 2008.

Patrick Furrer, the National Contact Point for ICT will explain the content of this call and provide us with the latest information from the European Commission.

Professor Adrian Ionescu will analyse the evaluation process of the Commission with emphasis on the most important points to be considered for writing a successful proposal.

For more detailed information please refer to the Euresearch site. Participation is free of charge but we kindly ask you to register beforehand.

We strongly recommend the Finance helpdesk, regularly informing about FP6 and FP7 financial issues. Recent publications concern for example:

- Recording Hours Guidelines for FP7 Projects
- Issues surrounding 60% Derogation Overhead Rate for SMEs
- List of documents required to be seen by Auditor

For more information and registration please refer to the Finance helpdesk.

The EU Research and Technological Development (RTD) framework programmes have been evaluated by the European Court of Auditors.

'Poorly defined programme objectives and weak performance measurement undermined effective monitoring and evaluation,' said the Court of Auditors in a statement. 'The absence of a comprehensive evaluation strategy, agreed between the Research Directorates-General implementing the framework programmes, resulted in inconsistent approaches between the different Commission services,' states the report.

Source: Cordis

The full report can be found here: http://eca.europa.eu/portal/pl...

Recently, a new service - Meeus - was created by the originators of the DESCA consortium agreement (www.desca-FP7.eu). It is intended as a self-help resource for the FP7 user community. It intends to give answers to difficult questions about FP7 from other FP7 users.

In general, answers are of high and will only improve with an increasing number of users.