NCN DAINA 4: Archived 2026 Call for Polish–Lithuanian Basic Research Projects

NCN DAINA 4: Archived 2026 Call for Polish–Lithuanian Basic Research Projects

Historical reference: DAINA 4 is closed. Its joint-proposal deadline was 15 September 2026, followed by the Polish national filing deadline of 22 September 2026 at 14:00 CEST. Both dates have passed. NCN’s 2026 activity plan describes discussions with RCL about continuing DAINA and preparation work for another edition, but the official programme and call pages still publish no new call or deadline. That planning statement is not an open application window. The date retained in the page metadata is the first, joint deadline. RCL’s Lithuanian submission closed at 17:00 on that date; the Polish OSF filing was a later national step, and it is closed as well.

DAINA is a bilateral funding instrument run by Poland’s National Science Centre (NCN, Narodowe Centrum Nauki) and the Research Council of Lithuania (RCL, Lietuvos mokslo taryba, also known as LMT). The fourth edition supported one jointly prepared basic-research project by teams in both countries. NCN and RCL assessed their national parts under their respective rules, and Polish funding depended on RCL awarding funds to the Lithuanian team as well. The archive below describes the completed round; it is useful for understanding the scheme and planning if the agencies announce another edition, but it is not an invitation to submit now.

DAINA 4 was announced on 15 June 2026. NCN allocated PLN 26 million for Polish research tasks. The Polish part of one project could request up to PLN 1.3 million, while the Lithuanian ceiling was €200,000 per project. Projects were planned for 36 months. NCN listed results for June 2027 and an expected project start in August 2027. These are the published timetable for DAINA 4, not an indication that submissions remain open.

Key Details at a Glance

What DAINA 4 Actually Funds

DAINA funds basic research and nothing else. NCN’s statutory remit is confined to basic research, and the call documents state plainly that NCN and LMT will fund only proposals meeting that criterion. Applied development work, technology demonstration, product-oriented engineering, and clinical implementation studies are outside the scheme regardless of how good the science is. If your project’s natural framing is “we will build and validate a tool for X”, you will need to be honest with yourself about whether the underlying question is genuinely a knowledge question or an engineering one. Reviewers in the NCN system are used to seeing applied projects dressed in basic-research vocabulary, and it rarely works.

Within that constraint the call is genuinely open. Proposals may be submitted in any of the 26 NCN panels, grouped into three domains: HS (Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts), ST (Physical Sciences and Engineering), and NZ (Life Sciences). There is no thematic priority, no named challenge, and no steer toward particular subfields. A philologist studying Grand Duchy manuscripts and a condensed-matter physicist compete in different panels against different peers, and both are equally welcome.

The one thing the call insists on beyond basic research is that the project be genuinely joint. There must be a joint Polish–Lithuanian research plan — one plan, one set of objectives, one logic — rather than two parallel national projects filed under a shared title.

Who Could Apply on the Polish Side

For the closed round, the Polish applicant could be an entity listed under the National Science Centre Act for which the funding did not constitute state aid. NCN’s DAINA 4 announcement lists universities, federations of science and higher-education entities, Polish Academy of Sciences research institutes, statutory research institutes, international research institutes in Poland, the Łukasiewicz Centre and its institutes, the Centre of Postgraduate Medical Education, the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, other continuously research-active entities, scientific libraries, legal entities with registered offices in Poland, and natural persons. A consortium of eligible entities could apply as a group; where multiple Polish partners sought NCN funding, NCN required that group structure and a cooperation agreement naming its leader. The official list and legal definitions govern over shorthand descriptions of eligible hosts.

A hard constraint applies to all of them: the Polish applicant must not be applying for state aid. This is not a formality. If the host entity conducts economic activity and the project would confer a selective advantage, the state-aid analysis changes what you can submit, and DAINA 4 does not accommodate it.

The principal investigator carries their own set of requirements:

• At least a PhD at the time of submission.
• Employment at the host institution on at least a part-time contract for the whole project duration.
• Residence in Poland for at least 50% of the project duration. For a 36-month project that is 18 months, and NCN does mean physical presence, not nominal affiliation.
• Not be named as a person conducting research in a MINIATURA proposal whose funding decision was not yet final.
• Avoid overlapping research tasks between proposals in the same call edition.
• Meet NCN’s detailed concurrent-project and concurrent-application restrictions. At submission, a PI could not manage three or more NCN-funded projects, or combine two managed projects with a proposal under evaluation or recommended for funding; additional limits applied to combinations of one managed project and two pending PI proposals, or three pending PI proposals. PRELUDIUM BIS and DIOSCURI had the stated exclusions. Check the call terms for the exact interaction of statuses rather than relying on the old shorthand “three or more projects.”

Post-doc positions in the project come with their own mobility rule. A post-doc had to be hired through an open recruitment procedure and either hold a PhD awarded by an institution other than the project host, or have completed a continuous, documented post-doctoral fellowship of at least nine months at an institution in a different country from the country where the PhD was awarded. The second route matters for researchers whose doctoral institution is also the project host. NCN also limited the eligible date of the PhD to the year of employment or the preceding 12 years, with documented career breaks extending that period under the call rules. PhD students and students receiving NCN scholarships also had to be recruited through an open call.

The Lithuanian Half of the Partnership

The Lithuanian part had a ceiling of €200,000 per project. The RCL call page says Lithuanian applicants had to apply through an eligible Lithuanian implementing institution listed in the Register of Education and Research Institutions, and the project leader had to hold a PhD. A person could submit only one application as project leader under the call. RCL funded only expenses incurred by Lithuanian institutions and their project implementers. Each principal Lithuanian project implementer had to commit at least 20 hours multiplied by the project duration in months, and the budget had to cover the full planned duration and its calendar years. The Lithuanian institution also had to plan to deliver at least one scientific publication with foreign co-authors submitted and accepted for peer review, and/or an international patent application, by the end of the project. These are Lithuanian-side conditions; applicants needed the RCL call documents for their exact application and budget rules.

RCL’s application instructions required the Lithuanian submission to be in English through its electronic system, with the CVs of the principal researchers on the Lithuanian and Polish teams, selected publications, and a letter from the implementing institution. The instructions specified up to ten key publications in each CV and a five-page CV limit. The RCL application included the Lithuanian budget; RCL permitted indirect costs up to 20% of direct Lithuanian costs. These national requirements were distinct from NCN’s Polish-side ceilings and its additional open-access indirect-cost provision. Do not merge the two countries’ budget rules when reading the archived figures.

The substantive research case was joint, and the national versions had to stay consistent. NCN required the shared proposal attached in OSF to be identical to the version submitted to RCL, with the NCN national information consistent with the joint application. Keeping one agreed source for the scientific plan, responsibilities, work packages, and cross-border budget assumptions reduces the chance that national submissions describe mismatched projects.

How the Closed Round Was Submitted

This section records the DAINA 4 process for reference; no application can now be submitted under this closed call. The official call set two linked filing stages:

1. By 15 September 2026 at 17:00, the Lithuanian applicant submitted the joint proposal in English through RCL’s electronic system. The application needed an eligible Lithuanian implementing institution and a PhD-holding project leader. Required accompanying materials included the CVs of the principal Lithuanian and Polish researchers, selected publications, and an institutional letter, alongside the proposal materials and Lithuanian budget required by RCL.
2. By 22 September 2026 at 14:00 CEST, the Polish applicant submitted its national proposal through NCN’s OSF system. That Polish filing included the joint proposal as a PDF, identical to the version submitted to RCL, and the Polish funding request and supporting material.

The second deadline was an administrative national filing, not extra time to prepare the shared research plan. NCN’s instructions asked teams to check their institutional approval and signature processes, verify that the form and annexes were complete, disable the final proposal, download the submission confirmation, obtain signatures, upload the signed confirmation, and use OSF’s send action. The submissions are closed. Anyone considering a future bilateral application should wait for a new official call and follow its own dates and instructions, since agencies can revise forms and eligibility conditions.

The NCN form for this round requested the project title in Polish and English; the complete English-language joint proposal with the documents required by RCL; CVs and publication records; public-facing summaries in Polish and English; a Polish-team research plan and budget; investigators’ qualifications and tasks; a description of the planned international cooperation and its advantages; information about data management; and relevant ethics matters, including approvals and permits. For research involving clinical trials with a medicinal product or medical device, the form required a detailed justification of the non-commercial nature of the trial. These requirements describe the closed DAINA 4 file, not guaranteed requirements for any future edition.

A practical lesson remains useful for partners planning other bilateral schemes: maintain a single agreed version of the joint scientific plan, budget assumptions, work packages, and personnel information. NCN required the joint proposal appended to OSF to match the version sent to RCL, and it required information in the national and joint applications to be consistent. Independent late editing can leave two national submissions describing different projects, creating a completeness or compliance problem before the scientific merits are considered.

What the Budget Can and Cannot Cover

Direct costs eligible on the Polish side include:

• Remuneration for the principal investigator, including full-time salary.
• Salaries and scholarships for post-docs, PhD students, and students.
• Research equipment, devices and software.
• Materials and consumables.
• Outsourced services.
• Business travel, including the travel that makes a bilateral project work.
• Other costs demonstrably essential to the project.

Indirect costs are capped at 20% of direct costs, with an additional up to 2% ring-fenced for open access publishing. That second slice is not a bonus; it is the mechanism NCN provides to pay article processing charges, and if you intend to publish in APC-charging venues you should use it rather than trying to fund publication from consumables at the end of the project.

There is no minimum project budget. There is a firm maximum of PLN 1.3 million for the Polish part. Within that, NCN’s long-standing practice is that unreasonable or unjustified costs are grounds for rejection or reduction, so a budget that maxes out the ceiling without a costing narrative to match is a liability, not an advantage.

How Proposals Are Evaluated

The division of labour in DAINA 4 is unusual and applicants routinely misread it.

Merit evaluation is conducted by the Research Council of Lithuania, through an international expert team it convenes. Scientific quality, the significance of the research question, methodology, the strength of the joint plan, and the qualifications of both teams are assessed there.

NCN performs eligibility verification only. NCN Coordinators check that the Polish applicant qualifies, that the PI meets the conditions, that the proposal is formally complete, and that the state-aid and basic-research conditions hold. NCN does not run a parallel scientific panel for this call.

The consequence: your scientific case is written for an international expert panel assembled by RCL, not for a Polish disciplinary panel. Write for readers who may not know the Polish or Lithuanian institutional context and who will not fill in gaps from local knowledge. Explain why this specific pairing of teams is the right one, not merely that both are competent.

NCN’s published condition was that the Polish team could receive NCN funding only when RCL also awarded funding to the Lithuanian team. NCN and RCL made their national eligibility checks under their respective rules.

Open Access, Data Management and Research Integrity

NCN applies its open-science requirements to DAINA 4 in full. Publications arising from the project must be made openly available through one of three routes: publication in an open access journal registered in DOAJ, deposit in a repository listed in OpenDOAR, or publication under a transformative agreement. Licensing must be CC BY, CC0, or equivalent.

Research data must be handled according to FAIR principles, and a data management plan is a required part of the proposal. Reviewers increasingly treat a thin DMP as a signal about the rest of the project. If your fields are ones where data cannot be opened — sensitive personal data in social research, for instance — say so explicitly and describe the controlled-access arrangement, rather than leaving the section vague.

Ethics approvals, where the research requires them, should be identified in the proposal with a realistic account of when they will be obtained.

Planning Lessons for a Future Edition

Start from the partnership, not the project. NCN’s published 2026 activity plan says the agencies intended to discuss continuing DAINA and begin preparing another edition. It does not announce that call or set its dates. If a later edition is announced, a strong pairing should have a real reason to exist — shared material, complementary instrumentation, or a research question that spans both countries’ archives, ecosystems, or populations. A partner recruited solely to satisfy a bilateral requirement, without a real research contribution, will read exactly like that to an international panel.

Do not treat the two national parts as separable. The most common structural failure is a proposal that reads as “Polish sub-project A” plus “Lithuanian sub-project B” with a coordination work package stapled on. Build shared work packages with joint deliverables and named responsibilities on both sides.

Reconcile the two files before you freeze. Identical means identical. Personnel lists, work package numbering, milestone dates, and totals must match between the RCL joint submission and the OSF national submission.

Check the PI eligibility arithmetic early. The three-concurrent-projects rule and the 50% residence rule are binary. Discovering late in preparation that your intended PI will be on a long overseas posting is a project-ending problem, and it is foreseeable.

Respect the 36-month fixture. Unlike most NCN schemes, DAINA does not offer a choice of duration. A work plan that plainly needs four years and has been compressed into three will show.

Budget the travel honestly. Bilateral projects fail on logistics more often than on science. Meetings, exchanges, and shared fieldwork are eligible costs; underfunding them to buy more equipment is a false economy.

Do not assume the state-aid question is somebody else’s. If your host entity has any commercial arm, raise it with your grants office early in preparation.

Published DAINA 4 Timeline

• 15 September 2026 — joint proposals close at RCL.
• 22 September 2026, 2 pm — Polish national proposals close in OSF.
• June 2027 — results announced.
• August 2027 — funded projects begin.

This schedule is retained to document the completed round. NCN listed the decision for June 2027 and expected projects to start in August 2027. Neither date reopens the application window. If reading this archive before a later edition is announced, use it only as context; the agencies’ next official call documents will control the schedule, budget rules, and forms.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a Polish team apply without a Lithuanian partner? No. DAINA 4 required a joint Polish–Lithuanian project. NCN stated that it would fund the Polish team only if RCL also funded the Lithuanian team; the two agencies applied their own national rules.

What if the Lithuanian team is scored well but the Polish part fails eligibility? The Polish team cannot receive NCN funding if NCN’s national eligibility check fails; RCL’s merit evaluation cannot replace that check. The RCL rules determine the effect on the Lithuanian side.

Is applied or industry-facing research eligible? No. Only basic research qualifies.

Can the project run longer or shorter than 36 months? No. The duration is fixed at 36 months for this call.

Does the PLN 1.3 million ceiling include indirect costs? Budget ceilings in NCN calls are project totals; indirect costs are calculated as up to 20% of direct costs (plus up to 2% for open access) within that total. Confirm the arithmetic against the call documents and with your grants office before you finalise the figures.

What was the success rate? The official DAINA 4 announcement does not state a headline success rate. The PLN 26 million allocation and PLN 1.3 million Polish ceiling describe available funding, but do not show the number of eligible proposals or the final distribution of awards. Do not infer an award count by dividing the allocation by the maximum project budget.

Has another DAINA round been announced? The NCN programme page lists DAINA 4 as the latest call announcement. NCN’s 2026 activity plan says discussions about continuing the programme and preparation for another edition were planned, but neither that plan nor the current NCN and RCL call pages gives a new application period or deadline. Previous editions and preparation work do not establish when applications will open. Check NCN and RCL for a formal announcement instead of assuming a schedule.

In what language is the proposal written? NCN’s international-panel calls are conducted in English. Confirm the exact language requirements for each component in the call documents, as some Polish national attachments are filed in Polish.

Official Links and Contacts

• DAINA 4 call announcement (NCN, English): https://ncn.gov.pl/en/ogloszenia/konkursy/daina4
• DAINA 4 call announcement and application requirements (RCL): https://lmt.lrv.lt/news/call-for-proposals-lithuaniapoland-research-projects-daina-4-7dF/
• DAINA programme page: https://www.ncn.gov.pl/en/wspolpraca-zagraniczna/wspolpraca-wielostronna/konkurs-daina
• DAINA FAQ: https://ncn.gov.pl/en/wspolpraca-zagraniczna/wspolpraca-wielostronna/konkurs-daina/faq
• NCN page on the Research Council of Lithuania: https://ncn.gov.pl/en/wspolpraca-zagraniczna/instytucje-partnerskie/lmt
• OSF submission system: https://osf.opi.org.pl

NCN’s coordinators for this call are Oskar Wolski for Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts; Anna Koteja for Physical Sciences and Engineering; Grzegorz Sowa for Life Sciences; and Jadwiga Spyrka for general call matters. General enquiries go to [email protected]. On the Lithuanian side, the named contact at RCL is Miglė Palujanskaitė.

Always verify deadlines, budget ceilings, and eligibility conditions against the official call documents on the NCN and RCL sites before submitting. Terms in bilateral calls can be amended after announcement, and the published call text governs.