On 19 May 2025, COST’s governing board, the Committee of Senior Officials (CSO), confirmed the funding of 70 new COST Actions, that will officially start in Autumn 2025.
The 70 new COST Actions in figures:
- 1 in 3 main proposers are Young Researchers or innovators
- 40% of the main proposers are women
- 70% of the networks already include partners from industry or SMEs
- 7% of main proposers come from an Inclusiveness Target Country (ITC)
- 73 countries from all 6 continents are represented among the funded networks
As an indicator of multidisciplinary, 51% of all Actions cover at least two OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) fields of science and technology, while 21% cover at least three fields.
Natural sciences lead the way as the most represented field of science (51% of the Actions), followed by Medical and Health Sciences (37%), Engineering and Technology (31%), Social Sciences (27%), Humanities (14%) and Agricultural Sciences (11%). Subfields that are particularly strongly represented in this call are Mathematics, Chemical Engineering, Clinical Medicine and the Arts.
The success rate for applications in this Open Call (OC-2024-1) is 8.3%.
“We are very happy to be able to approve 70 new COST Actions this year, an increase on the 60 networks that we could fund last year. The demand for this Open Call was exceptionally high, as was the quality of the proposals received. We wish we had the budget to fund all excellent proposals and we will continue to call for a reinforced budget to meet the demand for bottom-up networks and interdisciplinary collaboration.”
Dr Ronald de Bruin, Director of the COST Association
The 70 new COST Actions cover topics as wide and varied as gastrointestinal cancers, seed priming to boost crop resilience, science diplomacy, cultural heritage conservation, processing food waste into sustainable fibers, and comics for science.
Download the full list of newly approved COST Actions
On Thursday 12 June 2025 these new COST Actions, including all Memorandum’s of Understanding, will be available on the COST website so if you see a network that is of interest then you can apply to join. The official kick-off, the first Management Committee meeting, of these research networks will take place between September and November 2025.
Additional information
Download the full list of newly approved COST Actions
The current COST Open Call (OC-2025-1) remains open until 21 October 2025 at 12.00 (noon) CEST. Discover more about the simple one-step application process to submit a new COST Action.
Find out how to join an existing COST Action.