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COST Actions: your gateway to the EU funding game
By: Elena Dennison
Last updated: Wednesday, 12 March 2025
European funding can be daunting and difficult to navigate. Horizon Europe[1] is the biggest Research and Innovation pot of funding of its kind in the world. It is funding at a big scale. Many of its calls require a consortium of institutions working together. You must be connected to apply to Horizon Europe, and COST actions are a great way to start.
Funded under the Widening Participation strand of Horizon Europe, COST actions are a great way to make connections in your area of interest. COST actions are interdisciplinary research networks that bring researchers and innovators together to investigate a topic of their choice for 4 years.
COST Actions are different to many other EU projects because it is possible to join and participate in a research network once it has started, even if you were not involved at the proposal phase. You could just jump into the existing COST action of your choice, get funding to participate in their activities (training schools, conferences, workshops, etc), and make friends along the way!
Follow these easy 3 steps to start your EU journey:
STEP 1 - Register on the COST website.
STEP 2 - Browse the COST actions database for a topic of your interest (remember to filter to ‘active’ actions). For each Action you will find contact details for the Chair, the Working Group leaders, and a link to the Action’s own website. There is even a button where you can click and directly apply to join the Action.
STEP 3 - Make friends (with whom to apply to future Horizon Europe calls...)
For more info about how to participate in an active COST action follow this link:
https://www.cost.eu/cost-actions/participate-in-an-ongoing-action/
[1] Horizon Europe is the EU’s Research & Innovation programme. With an overall budget of 95.5 billion Euros for 2021-2027 it is the biggest of its kind in the world. In very rough brushstrokes Horizon Europe is organised into 3 main pillars each with its own budget allocation from the overall cake: Pillar 1 Excellent Science: your idea, your research, European Research Council (ERC) calls, and Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) are part of this pillar; Pillar 2 Global Challenges with ‘defined’ calls where the commission tells you exactly what they want, this is almost exclusively for consortium proposals; and Pillar 3 Innovative Europe: market focused.