Research Ethics in Horizon Europe projects

If your proposal raises one or more of the issues listed in the Horizon Europe ethics issues table (Form A of propsal), you must also complete the ethics self-assessment. This must include a description of the issue, the way you intend to deal with them in order to ensure ethics compliance and any relevant documents (such as authorisation or permissions that are already available with their expiry date). In case such documents are not yet available, please provide the expected timing.

If the proposal is shortlisted (main and reserve list) for possible funding it will also go through an ethics review to get an ethics clearancee. Conditional clearance: If f the ethics review leads to requirements to be implemented before grant signature, you will need to take immediate action to comply (and may also have to adapt the Description of the Action (DoA) Part B to reflect this). If the review leads to additional requirements to be fulfilled during the project, they are automatically added as ethics deliverables into the system and DoA Part A and will be placed in an automatically generated work package called ethics requirements.

If the review shows that there are serious ethics issues that cannot be solved, funding may have to be refused.

Ethics requirements can be e.g.

• regular reporting to the Commission/Executive Agency
• the appointment of an independent ethics advisor or ethics board
• necessary adaptation of the methodology to comply with the ethical principles and relevant legislations
• submission of further information/documents
• etc.

You will be informed by the UiB LEAR Liv-Grethe.Gudmundsen@uib.no about actions to be taken related to this. 

The ethics self-assessment will become part of your Grant Agreement and may give rise to binding obligations that may later on be checked through ethics checks, reviews or audits. A work package on 'ethics requirements' may be added to your grant agreement by EC as soon as the ethics review has been completed. This may happen even if you have not specified this in your proposal, so please be aware that additional deliverables may have been included in your project related to the Ethics WP.

A separate Ethics Work Package will be added to your grant agreement by EC as soon as the ethics review has been completed. This may happen even if you have not specified this in your proposal, so please be aware that additional deliverables may have been included in your project related to the Ethics WP.

This Ethics Work Pacage will be visible in the the Participant portal where all interaction with the European Commission will take place (added as first or last WP). 

Ethics deliverables: All ethics requirements due after project start are automatically included in the grant agreement in the form of deliverables. These deliverables are known as 'ethics deliverables' and will be placed in an automatically generated work package called 'ethics requirements'.

Consider that ethics issues arise in many areas. For Horizon Europe projects, apart from the obvious example, the medical field, research protocols in social sciences, ethnography, psychology, environmental studies, security research, etc. may involve the voluntary participation of research subjects and the collection of data that might be considered as personal. For Digital Europe and EDF, the collection of personal data and the deployment and application of AI in any form are the obvious candidates. However, issues may arise in other fields as well. You must protect the addressees of your project, yourself and your colleagues.

Depending on your research activities ethics deliverables may be: 

• Documentation of approval of data transfer 
• Templates for informed consent from participants
• Declaration on compliance/authorization for collecting and processing personal data (NSD)
• Declaration on compliance/authorization for collecting and processing health data (REK)
• etc

This page is updated by Vibeke Irgan