Cooperation with EARMA

Although the COST targeted network officially ended in October 2019, the former BESTPRAC Core Group has remained active and working hard to find solutions to keep the network activities alive beyond COST’s financial support.

As one of BESTPRAC’s sustainability initiatives, for some time now, we have been working on exploring the possibilities of a joint future with EARMA. In the last year and a half, BESTPRAC and EARMA have organized three very successful virtual meetings, you can read more about them here. These meetings, even though held in a virtual setting, followed the BESTPRAC principles of a bottom-up, open and inclusive approach.

As the collaboration proved to be successful and beneficial to both networks, during 2021 two significant things happened that impact the future of the BESTPRAC network.

The first was that BESTPRAC was included as a partner in EARMA’s Horizon Europe project “Creating Framework Conditions for Research Management to Strengthen the European Research Area” (RM ROADMAP). This project was successfully applied for funding under the HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01 call, that will support the strengthening of an inclusive research management community in Europe. Unfortunately, since the BESTPRAC network does not have a legal form, it is being represented in the consortium by the institutions of three of our Core group members – HETFA Research Institute, Hungary (Virág ZSÁR); Nova University Lisbon, Portugal (Cristina OLIVEIRA) and The Cyprus Institute, Cyprus (Andri CHARALAMBOUS).

The second, even more important news was that EARMA and BESTPRAC have come to an agreement that BESTPRAC is going to become a thematic group within EARMA! We are very excited about this initiative and hope it will allow BESTPRAC to continue and improve our work, as well as grow and develop, with the support of a well-established and experienced organisation such as EARMA. It is important to note that the EARMA membership fees will not apply to the BESTPRAC thematic group, as both networks wish to build a truly inclusive RMA community in Europe. More information about the thematic group will be available soon.