FWF–ISF Austrian–Israeli Joint Projects 2026: Uncapped 36- to 48-Month Bilateral Research Funding Decided by a Single FWF Lead-Agency Review, Closing 10 December 2026

FWF–ISF Austrian–Israeli Joint Projects 2026: Uncapped 36- to 48-Month Bilateral Research Funding Decided by a Single FWF Lead-Agency Review, Closing 10 December 2026

The Israel Science Foundation (ISF) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) run a standing bilateral call for cross-border research projects, and the 2026 edition is now the one to plan around. The submission window at the FWF opens on 7 September 2026, and joint proposals are due to the FWF by 10 December 2026 at 2:00 pm Vienna local time. The Israeli administrative and financial submission follows three days later, on 13 December 2026 at 1:00 pm Jerusalem time, and Israeli applicants have an earlier hard gate: pre-registration with the ISF by 28 October 2026 at 1:00 pm Jerusalem time.

The structural fact that governs everything else is this: a bilateral project part is not an independent project. It cannot be carried out separately, and it cannot be funded separately. The two agencies expect a single research project with two national halves that each make a significant contribution to the whole. A proposal that reaches only one of the two agencies is rejected outright.

Key Details

What the Call Funds and What It Deliberately Does Not Say

This is a thematically open call for basic research. The FWF’s guidance is short on this point and means it literally: the call is open to all areas of scientific research. There is no priority topic, no mission framing, and no requirement that the work map onto a societal challenge. What the agencies are buying is a bilateral project whose two halves combine complementary expertise and produce something neither team could produce alone.

There is also no headline funding figure, and applicants should not read that as a gap in the documentation. Under the FWF’s Principal Investigator Projects rules, the funding amount is not capped and the maximum funding period is four years. You request the project-specific personnel and non-personnel costs your research actually needs, and the size of your request has a procedural consequence rather than a hard ceiling — it drives how many peer reviews the FWF must commission. On the Israeli side, the ISF’s Personal Research Grants guidelines set the budget rules for the Israeli half.

Because there is no cap, the discipline in your budget has to come from you. A four-year request with three funded positions in Austria is not automatically more competitive than a three-year request with one; it just needs more work to justify and attracts more scrutiny.

How the Lead Agency Procedure Works in 2026

The two agencies alternate the administrative burden. For 2026, the FWF is the acting Lead Agency, which means the FWF alone handles submission, evaluation, and selection. Your joint proposal is prepared according to FWF formal guidelines, submitted through the FWF’s elane portal, and reviewed under the FWF’s standard international peer review process. The ISF does not run a parallel review.

After review, the FWF proposes a list of projects to be funded by the ISF. Once the ISF confirms the FWF’s funding recommendation, each agency funds its own national team according to its own procedures. Money never crosses the border: the Austrian part is paid by the FWF and the Israeli part by the ISF.

Two practical implications follow. First, the writing standard you are being judged against is the FWF’s, not the ISF’s — the FWF Application Guidelines for Principal Investigator Projects are the document to read line by line. Second, the ISF submission is administrative rather than scientific: Israeli applicants provide the ISF with a copy of the proposal submitted to the FWF and enter administrative and financial data in the ISF online system. That is a filing obligation, not a second application, but missing it is still fatal.

Eligibility on Each Side

Austria. The FWF-funded part of the project and the FWF applicant must meet the eligibility criteria in the FWF Application Guidelines for Principal Investigator Projects. In practice that means an applicant with the academic qualifications needed to lead the proposed research, working at an Austrian research institution that has the infrastructure the project requires. All activities funded under the call must comply with applicable Austrian law and FWF regulations.

Israel. The Israeli partner is judged against the ISF’s application guidelines for Personal Research Grants. Those guidelines, not the FWF’s, define who may serve as the Israeli principal investigator and what the Israeli budget may contain.

Both. Funding under this call may only be granted to institutions established within the internationally recognized territory of the partner country. The call documents state explicitly that funding may not be used to support activities carried out in territories that came under its control after June 1967. If any part of your fieldwork, collection access, or partner institution sits in that category, resolve it before you write rather than after you submit.

What You Actually Have to Submit

The joint proposal is prepared according to the Lead Agency’s formal guidelines. The core elements:

• A project description of no more than 20 pages, covering the entire Austrian–Israeli research project rather than the Austrian half. Beyond the elements the FWF guidelines already require, the description must additionally address the distribution of work between the partners and the added value of the cooperation.
• Annex 2, “Financial Aspects,” which must include information on both the Austrian and the Israeli parts of the project. This is one of the most commonly botched requirements: the annex is bilateral even though the money is administered separately.
• Annex 3, CVs and publication lists for both the Austrian applicant and the Israeli principal investigator, prepared in accordance with FWF guidelines. Under section 2.2.3 of those guidelines, CVs for up to three additional project participants may be added.

Costs are calculated according to the rules of whichever agency funds that part. The Austrian costs follow the FWF Application Guidelines for Principal Investigator Projects; the Israeli costs follow ISF guidelines. The FWF explicitly recommends consulting the scientific project officers in its specialist departments about cost questions before submission — a free sanity check that a surprising number of applicants skip.

Submitting Through elane, and the PROFI Approval Step

Proposals go in online through elane, the FWF’s digital application portal. When submitting, select the program category “PIN International Programs. ISF/Israel 2026 FWF = Lead Agency”. Choosing the wrong category is a recoverable but time-wasting error.

FWF project funding is administered through research institutions under the PROFI model. That means the application must be approved for submission by both the applicant and the lead research institution — and the recorded time of submission is the moment the lead research institution approves and submits it, not the moment you finish writing. Research institutions may waive their approval requirement, but you should confirm your institution’s practice weeks in advance rather than assume it. Institutional research support offices do not clear approvals at 1:55 pm on the deadline day.

All required forms must be completed online, and the project description, annexes, and any additional documents must be uploaded in full before the institution can approve submission.

One genuine safety net exists. In calls with fixed deadlines, applicants are given the chance to correct proposals that do not meet the FWF’s formal requirements. Corrections must be made within 10 days of notification by the FWF Office. If the proposal still fails after that window, the FWF Executive Board can reject it without further review. Treat this as insurance against a formatting slip, not as an extension.

The Timeline You Are Working To

• 7 September 2026 — FWF submission window opens.
• 28 October 2026, 1:00 pm Jerusalem time — ISF pre-registration deadline. Proposals without pre-registration are not considered eligible by the ISF.
• 10 December 2026, 2:00 pm Vienna local time — FWF submission deadline. Late proposals are not processed.
• 13 December 2026, 1:00 pm Jerusalem time — ISF administrative and financial submission deadline.
• By September 2027 — results expected.

Work backwards from the ISF pre-registration date rather than the December deadline. Pre-registration on 28 October effectively sets the point by which the partnership must be firm, the title and scope settled, and the Israeli PI committed. Roughly three months separate the opening of the window from the FWF deadline, and a 20-page description that convincingly integrates two teams is not a three-week document.

Evaluation, and How Many Reviewers You Will Face

The FWF evaluates all applications according to its own rules on the basis of its international peer review process. The minimum number of reviews is calculated based on the larger of the two requested amounts — the FWF request or the ISF request — and, importantly, the two requested amounts are not added together for this purpose. Section 3.3 of the FWF application guidelines sets out the thresholds.

This detail is worth planning around. A modest Austrian request paired with a large Israeli request will still trigger the higher review count, and vice versa. More reviewers means more chances for a specialist objection, so the proposal has to hold up across a wider slice of the field rather than satisfying two sympathetic readers.

Preparing a Competitive Bilateral Proposal

The two mandatory additions to the project description — distribution of work and added value of the cooperation — are where bilateral proposals are won and lost. Reviewers see a great many applications where two capable groups have stapled their existing programmes together and asserted synergy in a closing paragraph.

Make the integration structural. Show work packages that genuinely require both teams: a method developed in Vienna applied to material only accessible in Israel, an instrument on one side and a model on the other, a dataset that only becomes interpretable when both analytical traditions are applied. Name who does what, when, and with which deliverable feeding into which downstream task.

Then answer the harder question directly: what does this project produce that neither team could produce alone? “Complementary expertise” is a claim, not evidence. Evidence looks like a technique that exists in one lab and not the other, a corpus or cohort with restricted access, an infrastructure dependency, or a preliminary joint result that already demonstrates the pairing works.

Budget symmetry deserves thought too. The two halves need not be equal in cost — research rarely is — but a lopsided budget invites the reading that one partner is a junior appendage. If the split is uneven, explain why in the work distribution section rather than letting reviewers infer it from Annex 2.

Common Mistakes

• Submitting to one agency only. Proposals that reach only the FWF or only the ISF are rejected. Both submissions must land by their respective deadlines.
• Skipping ISF pre-registration. The 28 October gate is not a courtesy notification. Without it, the ISF does not consider the proposal eligible.
• Mismatched project durations. The duration must be identical for the Austrian and Israeli parts. Requesting 48 months in Vienna and 36 in Jerusalem is an inconsistency, not a rounding issue.
• Writing a national proposal. The 20-page description must cover the entire bilateral project. A description that reads as the Austrian project with an Israeli collaborator bolted on will be read exactly that way.
• Leaving the Israeli budget out of Annex 2. The financial annex is explicitly bilateral even though the funding streams are separate.
• Missing CVs. Both the Austrian applicant and the Israeli PI need CVs and publication lists in Annex 3, formatted to FWF rules. Up to three additional participants may be included — a useful way to evidence specialist capability, and one applicants often forget is available.
• Assuming institutional approval is instant. Under PROFI, the timestamp that counts is the institution’s approval and submission through elane.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a maximum grant size? The call sets no cap. The FWF’s Principal Investigator Projects funding amount is not capped and the maximum funding period is four years. You request what the research requires, and the size of the request determines the minimum number of peer reviews.

Which agency do I write for? The FWF, as acting Lead Agency for 2026. The joint proposal must be prepared according to FWF formal guidelines and the FWF Application Guidelines for Principal Investigator Projects.

Does the ISF review the science separately? No. The FWF evaluates all applications and proposes a list of projects for ISF funding; the ISF confirms the recommendation, then each agency funds its own national team.

Can my project run for two years? No. The minimum duration is 36 months and the maximum is 48 months.

What if my proposal has a formal defect? In fixed-deadline calls such as this one, the FWF gives applicants the opportunity to correct proposals that do not meet formal requirements, within 10 days of notification. Persistent non-compliance can lead to rejection without review.

When will I know? Results are expected by September 2027.

Is this call recurring? The FWF and ISF alternate the Lead Agency role across editions, which indicates a continuing bilateral arrangement rather than a one-off. The specific dates, and which agency leads, are set per edition — so check the official page for future rounds rather than assuming this year’s calendar repeats.

Official Links and Contacts

• Call page: FWF — Israel
• Programme background: FWF — Principal Investigator Projects International
• Submission portal: elane
• FWF enquiries: [email protected] — Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna, +43 1 505 67 40
• ISF enquiries: [email protected]

The FWF publishes a short “FWF–ISF: Information for Applicants” document alongside the call page; it is the authoritative source for deadlines, formal requirements, and the annex rules described above, and it should be read in full before you begin drafting. Where this guide and the official documents differ, the official documents govern.