Electronic Submission Systems (ESS)

Electronic submission systems (ESS) are the standard tool for submitting transnational proposals to joint calls. The main functionality is the proposal upload. Simple ESS allow applicants to upload proposals to a server; more advanced systems also allow P2P consortium partners to manage the evaluation process as well as the subsequent monitoring of projects. Thus, apart from being a submission system an ESS is an information-hub with restricted access only for authorised individuals (agency, expert/evaluator, evaluator panel), for evaluation and/or monitoring purposes. ESS systems should not have technical limitations and be able to operate whatever kind of call and a reasonable number of proposals even when 90% of all proposals are received within the last hour before the deadline. Often the ESS is derived or adapted from a submission system already in use for national/regional calls.

• Standard ESS functionalities:

• Enable proposal submission (online, or online + PDF attachment) via a secure website and automatically generated notification to applicants
• data-hub with secure and restricted access for defined user groups (e.g. call secretariat, funding organisations) thus distributing the proposals for further steps

• Advanced ESS functionalities:

• Facilitate evaluation (assignment of proposals to individual evaluators, enable external evaluation by assigned evaluators, facilitate virtual meetings of evaluators)
• Enable monitoring of project status by involved funding agencies
• Tools to generate call statistics