Since 14 July the Participant Portal provides a new service for finding potential partners for Horizon 2020 proposals. The service is complementary to existing partner search services offered by a number of NCPs and other organisations. It makes use of existing data in the Commission's databases for automatically creating  organisation profiles.

Organisation profiles

In its first version, the service allows searching for organisations and displaying their profiles. The profiles comprise:

·         Organisation name, city, country, Participant Identification Code (PIC)

·         Organisation type (Higher or secondary education establishment, SME, etc.)

·         The list of  EU projects in which the organisation is involved

·         An overview of its main collaboration links with other organisations

·         Keywords related to its projects, indicating its fields of expertise

The bulk of the organisation profile is created automatically. In addition, LEARs or Account Administrators can edit two data fields:

·         Add or delete keywords

·         Add a summary description of your organisation

Contact organisations or project participants

Users of the portal can contact organisations, via a web form that sends a message to the LEAR and Account Administrator. Similarly, users can contact participants in projects (Participant Contacts).

These functions do not disclose the identity of the LEARs, Account Administrators or Participant Contacts. 

Plans for future developments

The service will be expanded in two additional stages to include:

·         The possibility to indicate an interest in finding partners related to a particular call topic (open or forthcoming).

Planned delivery: December 2017

·         The option to publish profiles of individual persons and make them searchable. As for the organisation profiles, also the person profiles will be created automatically, based on the available data. For the person profiles, any disclosure requires the explicit consent of the person.  In the initial stage, only the person herself will have access to her profile, with a possibility to decide on the subset of data that can be made public (including the possibility to not make any data public).

Planned delivery: 1st quarter of 2018

We appreciate your feedback

The current service is a beta version, so we very much appreciate your feedback and suggestions for improvements, via the PP forum site.