Project Plan SSH 2025
On this page, you will find additional information for the Refine Project Idea (Step 2) and, in particular, about how to prepare your Project Plan.
Project Plan Template
If you submitted an Expression of Interest and would like to proceed in our process, you must refine your project idea into a Project Plan using our Project Plan template (available as .docx and .odt). In order to be considered for the next step, project plans must be submitted by 1 July 2025, 14:00 CEST, through our page (using ConfTool, see below) as a PDF file.
The application must be completed in English and must adhere to the word limit. Late or incomplete submissions will not be considered. The name of the PDF file must include the allocated TDCC code that you received in the confirmation of your Expression of Interest submission and follow the format: “C2025-0XX_Project_Plan_Title”.
After the deadline, an Assessment & Selection Committee will review all viable submissions. You will receive your feedback in September 2025, and you will be informed if you have been selected to write a full proposal for the NWO TDCC Call 2025, in which case you proceed to the next step (Step 3. Proposal Writing).
Disclaimers
Before submitting your project plan, you must ensure that your project is internally approved at your institution, as well as at any other participating institutions. Therefore, we suggest you contact your grant support officer(s) early on when preparing your project plan. They may also be able to give you tips on how to write a better project plan, how to structure your work packages, etc. Make sure to obtain management approval, ensure that the required 25% co-financing contribution is available in your consortium, and complete other relevant steps at/with their institutions.
If you or any project partners who want to apply for funding are not from universities located in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, university medical centres, or institutes affiliated to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) or NWO, then you must first check if you can become eligible. Contact the NWO programme officers to do the eligibility check: thematisch-dcc@nwo.nl
Project plans from non-eligible parties will not be able to move forward in our process, so ensure your eligibility before you start your project plan.
As the TDCC-SSH, we do not actively encourage the use of generative AI in our project facilitation process. However, we recognise that it is not feasible to effectively monitor or prohibit its use and that some tools, when used responsibly, can be helpful to increase quality. This is why we allow applicants to use AI tools when preparing their submissions, under the condition that they remain fully responsible for the content of the project plans/proposals and disclose their use of AI tools (questions during project plan submission).
Similar to the official NWO policy, we acknowledge that generative AI plays a growing role in many areas and that its use poses challenges for authenticity and transparency.
The assessment of submissions is strictly done by humans. Using generative AI in the assessment process is strictly prohibited to ensure fair and expert-based reviews of submissions.
We use the ConfTool platform for submitting and evaluating project plans. In order to use the platform, you can either create an account or use an existing account if you have used it before.
The link to our ConfTool page, as well as more detailed information, will be added here by the beginning of June.
The Assessment & Selection (A&S) Committee is a panel of experts working in various fields, organizations, and levels of their careers. They will assess all valid project plan submissions, producing a ranking and allocating final budgets. Projects will be selected starting from the highest ranking until the total call budget for this year is used up.
The A&S Committee evaluates the project plans in sub-groups, based on a list of criteria. To increase your chances of a higher-ranked position, ensure that your project fits the TDCC-SSH roadmap, the NWO TDCC call 2025, and the evaluation criteria below:
• General impression of the project plan
• The project fits the collaborative spirit of the TDCC, involving multiple parties in the development and execution of the project idea
• The TDCC-SSH roadmap challenges are addressed convincingly in the project
• The project plan convincingly demonstrates that the project will build on existing knowledge and projects (avoiding overlap)
• The project team brings the right expertise to achieve the project goals
• The project idea addresses an urgent issue
• The project idea is convincing in how it will reach its target audience and ensure adoption/use
• The project idea is described clearly
• The proposed project design fits the aim of the project
• The estimated project budget is appropriate
As a submitter, you are responsible for checking for overlap with relevant initiatives. Has this topic already been worked on? Is there another project already planned that will attempt something very similar? This will be considered in the evaluation of your project plan.
To help you with a starting point (!) for your search, we have compiled a shortlist of larger projects and related initiatives:
• Previous TDCC projects: "Bottleneck" projects & selected Challenge Call 2024
• SSHOC-NL, specifically the different workstreams/task groups https://zenodo.org/records/7645356
• PDI-SSH projects funded in 2020 call and 2021 call
• HAICu: digital Humanities - Artificial Intelligence - Cultural heritage project: NWO project base, project website
OSCARS (Horizon Europe project); specifically from the Social Sciences and Humanities Science Cluster (SSHOC - not to be confused with SSHOC-NL!)
• E-RIHS: European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science, previous projects: https://e-rihs.nl/en/projecten/ (more projects approved, but not public yet)
Other places to check are different NWO grants and projects (e.g. NWO project database) and other funders and organisations. You are expected to do this research yourself, this responsibility falls on you.
We must avoid duplicating effort, re-inventing the wheel, or letting previous work go to waste.
Do you know of a project or initiative that should be listed here? Help us out by sending them to ssh@tdcc.nl.
