Legal notice

The information on this site is subject to a disclaimer, a copyright notice and rules related to personal data protection.

Disclaimer

 

The ERC maintains this website to enhance public access to information about its initiatives and European Union policies in general. Our goal is to keep this information timely and accurate. If errors are brought to our attention, we will try to correct them.

However the ERC accepts no responsibility or liability whatsoever with regard to the information on this site.

This information is:

• of a general nature only and is not intended to address the specific circumstances of any particular individual or entity;
   
• not necessarily comprehensive, complete, accurate or up to date;
   
• sometimes linked to external sites over which the ERC has no control and for which the ERC assumes no responsibility;
   
• not professional or legal advice (if you need specific advice, you should always consult a suitably qualified professional).

Please note that it cannot be guaranteed that a document available online exactly reproduces an officially adopted text. Only the Official Journal of the European Union (the printed edition or, since 1 July 2013, the electronic edition on the EUR-Lex website) is authentic and produces legal effects.

It is our goal to minimize disruption caused by technical errors. However some data or information on our site may have been created or structured in files or formats that are not error-free and we cannot guarantee that our service will not be interrupted or otherwise affected by such problems. The ERC accepts no responsibility with regard to such problems incurred as a result of using this site or any linked external sites.

This disclaimer is not intended to limit the liability of ERC in contravention of any requirements laid down in applicable national law nor to exclude its liability for matters which may not be excluded under that law.

 

Copyright notice
 

© European Research Council Executive Agency 2009 - 2021 ERCEA's reuse policy is implemented by the Decision of 12 December 2011 - reuse of Commission documents [PDF, 728 KB]. Unless otherwise indicated (e.g. in individual copyright notices), content owned by the ERCEA and/or EU on this website is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This means that reuse is allowed, provided appropriate credit is given and changes are indicated. You may be required to clear additional rights if a specific content depicts identifiable private individuals or includes third-party works. To use or reproduce content that is not owned by the ERCEA and/or EU, you may need to seek permission directly from the right-holders. Software or documents covered by industrial property rights, such as patents, trade marks, registered designs, logos and names, are excluded from the Commission's reuse policy and are not licensed to you.

 

Personal Data Protection
 

The European Union is committed to user privacy.

The policy on "protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by the Community institutions" is based Regulation (EU) 2018/1725 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2018 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data by the Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 and Decision No 1247/2002/EC (hereinafter ”the Regulation”).
This general policy covers all the European Union's family of institutional websites within the europa.eu domain

Information on ERC funded projects is available in the “Project and Results” section.
Some of these data may be retrievable in comma separated value (csv) file format or in PDF format.

• For personal data in the context of FP7 grants: please note the ERC Executive Agency specific privacy statement for  “ERC - Proposals Evaluation and Grants Management”.

• For personal data in the context of H2020 grants: the specific privacy statement (SPS) on Proposal, Evaluation, Grant Management and follow-up and the SPS for Evaluation and Monitoring Experts, are available on the European Commission Funding and Tenders Portal.
   

E-services
 

When browsing the ERC website, some personal information is required through cookies in order to provide the e-services you request.
Such information will be treated according to the policy described in the Regulation mentioned above. Information about the use of your data is provided in the specific privacy policy statement (see below).

In this respect:

• Within each Institution, a Data Protection Officer ensures that the provisions of the Regulation are applied and advises controllers on fulfilling their obligations (see art. 43 to 45 of the Regulation). As this website is managed by the ERCEA, you can contact the ERCEA Data Protection Officer for any questions or complaints. Please choose "data protection" as the category for which you would like to ask a question in the contact form;

• For all the Institutions, the European Data Protection Supervisor [27 KB] will act as an independent supervisory authority (see art. 52 to 60 of the Regulation).

The European Union's family of institutional websites, within the europa.eu domain, provides links to third party sites. Since we do not control them, we encourage you to review their privacy policies (see cookies).
 

What is an e-service?
 

An e-service on EUROPA is a service or resource made available on the Internet in order to improve the communication between citizens and businesses on the one hand and the European Institutions on the other hand.

The ERC website offers both:

1. Information services that provide citizens, media, business, administrations and other decision makers with easy and effective access to information, thus increasing transparency and understanding of the policies and activities of the EU;
    
2. Interactive communication services that allow better contacts with citizens, business, civil society and public actors thus facilitating policy consultations, and feedback mechanisms, in order to contribute to the shaping of policies, the activities and the services of the EU.
    

Specific privacy statement
 

• What information is collected, for what purpose and through which technical means
  The ERC website collects personal information exclusively to the extent necessary to fulfil a specific purpose. The information will not be re-used for an incompatible purpose.
   
• To whom your information is disclosed.
  We will only disclose information to third parties if that is necessary for the fulfilment of the purpose(s) identified above and to the mentioned (categories of) recipients. We will not use nor divulge your personal data for direct marketing purposes.
   
• How you can access your information, verify its accuracy and, if necessary, correct it.
  You can contact the responsible controller by using the email address indicated in the DPN. As a data subject you also have the right to object to the processing of your personal data on legitimate compelling grounds except when it is collected in order to comply with a legal obligation, or is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party, or is to be used for a purpose for which you have given your unambiguous consent.
   
• How long your data is kept.
  The EU only keeps the data for the time necessary to fulfil the purpose of collection or further processing. Some statistical data may be kept, with the appropriate safeguards in place, for a longer period in order to analyse the use of the website.
   
• What are the security measures taken to safeguard your information against possible misuse or unauthorised access
  The ERCEA puts in place measures to guarantee that your personal data are kept up-to-date and processed securely. We strive to ensure a high level of security for information shared with us (for example when filling in our contact form), such as using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). Nevertheless, communication over the internet, including email, is not fully secure and can potentially be intercepted by persons outside of the ERC.
   
• Whom to contact if you have queries or complaints.
  You can contact the ERCEA Data Protection by selecting "data protection" as the category for which you would like to ask a question in the contact form.
   
• The data protection notice is accessible here

 

How do we treat the personal data that you communicate to us?

 

Contact form
 

Our website offers the possibility to contact the ERC by using the form available on this web page. When you send such a message, your personal data is processed only to the extent necessary to reply. If the management team of the mailbox is unable to answer your question, it will forward your e-mail to another service. You will be informed, via e-mail, about which service your question has been forwarded to.

If you have any questions about the processing of your e-mail and related personal data, do not hesitate to include them in your message selecting "data protection" as the category for which you would like to ask a question in the contact form.

 

News subscription
 

You will be able to subscribe to our news by registering your email address in a subscription form present in every ERC web page.
If you subscribe to our news, your email will be registered in a database offered by YMLP and managed by ERCEA staff. Your email address will only be used for sending you news concerning ERC activities and Calls.
You can consult the privacy policy of YMLP here.
You can always unsubscribe by sending us an email through the contact form , category "Web" or by clicking the "unsubscribe" link at the end of every news email you receive from us.

 

Cookies – storing information on your computer

 

What are cookies? 
 

To ensure the proper functioning of this site, some web services used by erc.europa.eu place small data files on your computer, known as cookies.

Most big websites or internet service providers do this too. Cookies help the site remember your settings and preferences so you don’t have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to us.

We use Europa Analytics cookies to understand our website performance.

Social media cookies
 

• The videos and tweets present on the website are embedded from Vimeo, YouTube and Twitter. All these websites have their own cookies and privacy policies that are automatically applied when viewing a webpage which has videos or tweets integrated, but over which we have no control.
   
• By clicking on the LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook button on our website you will be re-directed to the relevant site, which has its own cookies and privacy policies over which we have no control.
   

ERC Website may use Bitly as webservice for shortening hyperlinks: Bitly has its own cookies and privacy policies that are automatically applied when clicking on a Bitly link (hyperlink shortened using Bitly), over which we have no control.
 

Europa Analytics

Europa Analytics is the corporate service, which monitors and evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the European Research Council website.
It uses an open-source analytics platform, Piwik, fully controlled by the European Commission. This platform enables the protection of end-user personal data thanks to features such as IP address de-identification and a mechanism for users to opt-out so that their browsing is not processed for analytics purposes.

Privacy measures

Europa Analytics is configured to use the second level domain europa.eu (used by the websites of European institutions) and to store first-party cookies that expire after 13 months.
Cookies (from Piwik) used by Europa Analytics enable the European Research Council to track the following information about visitors. We use this information to prepare aggregated, anonymous statistics reports of visitor activity:

•    IP address (masked)
•    Location: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude (Geolocation)
•    Date and time of the request (visit to the site)
•    Title of the page being viewed (Page Title)
•    URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
•    URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (Referrer URL)
•    Screen resolution of user's device
•    Time in local visitor's time-zone
•    Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download)
•    Links to an outside domain that were clicked (Outlink)
•    Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the visitor: Page speed)
•    Main language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
•    Browser version, browser plugins (PDF, Flash, Java, …) operating system version, device identifier (User-Agent header)
•    Language of the visited page
•    Campaigns
•    Site Search
•    Events

To improve the accuracy of the produced reports, information is also stored in a first-party cookie from our website and then collected by Europa Analytics:
•    Random unique Visitor ID
•    Time of the first visit for the specific visitor
•    Time of the previous visit for the specific visitor
•    Number of visits for the specific visitor

First party cookies are set by the website you’re visiting. Only that website can read them.  In addition, a website might potentially use an external service to analyse how people are using their site. Europa Analytics sets their own cookie to do this and does not use external parties.
The data collected is masked and cannot be used to identify a particular visitor. They will not be shared with any other organisation for marketing, market research or commercial purposes.
For persistent cookies, a random ID is generated by Piwik, which allows Europa Analytics to identify when a user returns to the site. All persistent cookies have an expiration date (13 months), after which they are automatically removed from the user's device.

Persistent cookies are saved on your computer and are not deleted automatically when you close your browser, unlike a session cookie, which is deleted when you close your browser.
The European Research Council retains full control of the data collected through first-party cookies by storing the data in servers fully owned and controlled by the European Commission.

 

How you can control cookies 

 

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish by changing the preference of the Internet Browsers– for a guide, see AboutCookies.
You can delete all the cookies already on your computer and you can set most browsers to block them being from placed. The ERC does not use cookies for any other purpose than those presented here.