NCN DAINA 4: PLN 26 Million for Joint Polish–Lithuanian Basic Research Projects, With Up to PLN 1.3 Million per Polish Team and €200,000 per Lithuanian Team, Joint Proposals Closing 15 September 2026

NCN DAINA 4: PLN 26 Million for Joint Polish–Lithuanian Basic Research Projects, With Up to PLN 1.3 Million per Polish Team and €200,000 per Lithuanian Team, Joint Proposals Closing 15 September 2026

DAINA is the standing bilateral instrument between Poland’s National Science Centre (NCN, Narodowe Centrum Nauki) and the Research Council of Lithuania (RCL, Lietuvos mokslo taryba, often abbreviated LMT). It funds one research project carried out by two national teams, one in each country, and it funds them as a single unit: if the Lithuanian half is not recommended for funding, the Polish half does not get funded either, and the reverse holds too. That single rule shapes almost every decision you will make while preparing an application.

The fourth edition, DAINA 4, was announced on 15 June 2026. NCN has allocated PLN 26 million for the Polish teams. The Polish part of any one project may not exceed PLN 1.3 million, and the Lithuanian part may not exceed €200,000. Every project runs for 36 months. Results are expected in June 2027, with projects starting in August 2027.

There are two deadlines, and this is where applicants most often get hurt. The joint proposal goes to the Research Council of Lithuania’s electronic system by 15 September 2026. The Polish national proposal goes to NCN’s OSF system by 22 September 2026 at 2 pm. The earlier date is the one that actually gates the application, so treat 15 September as your deadline and the following week as an administrative tail, not as extra writing time.

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 Can Apply on the Polish Side

The Polish applicant is normally an institution, not the researcher. Eligible entities include universities, institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences, research institutes, institutes of the Łukasiewicz Research Network, other independent research entities, scientific libraries, and companies operating as research and development centres. A natural person may also apply. So can a group of at least two entities, which is the required form if the Polish side of the project is itself distributed across more than one institution.

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 managing three or more NCN-funded projects at the time of submission.
• No conflicting roles across multiple proposals within the same call edition, and no overlapping research tasks between proposals.

Post-doc positions in the project come with their own rule that catches teams out: post-docs must be hired through an open recruitment procedure, and their PhD must come from a different institution than the one hosting the project. If your plan is to keep a promising recent graduate in the same lab, that is not what a DAINA post-doc slot is for.

The Lithuanian Half of the Partnership

The Lithuanian team applies to RCL under RCL’s rules, with a ceiling of €200,000 for their part. This is roughly half the Polish ceiling once converted at the call’s fixed rate of €1 = PLN 4.2411 (PLN 1.3 million is about €307,000), which is worth noting when you divide the work: an even 50/50 split of effort will usually not produce an even split of budget, and that is expected rather than suspicious.

The Lithuanian team’s material for the NCN side of the file consists principally of a signed Letter of Commitment and a detailed budget justification, submitted to RCL through its electronic system. But the substantive document — the joint research plan — is shared, and both national submissions must describe the same project. NCN is explicit that information in the two versions of the proposal must be consistent and identical. A discrepancy between the Polish and Lithuanian budget tables, work packages, or personnel lists is a formal problem, not a rounding issue.

Practically, this means you need one owner of the master document on each side and a single agreed freeze date. Teams that keep editing their national versions independently in the final fortnight tend to submit two documents that no longer match.

The Two-Deadline Submission Process

Read this section twice if you read nothing else.

1. By 15 September 2026 — the joint proposal is submitted through the Research Council of Lithuania’s electronic submission system. This is the version that goes to merit review. The Lithuanian partner typically drives this submission, but the Polish PI is a co-author of every substantive part of it.
2. By 22 September 2026, 2 pm — the Polish applicant submits the national proposal via OSF (https://osf.opi.org.pl). This includes the Polish budget, the Polish part of the research plan, CVs, and the data management plan.

The sequencing is deliberate: RCL receives the scientific case first and begins organising review, while NCN’s later window exists to complete the Polish administrative record. It does not exist to let you finish writing. If 15 September passes without a joint submission, there is nothing for the 22 September filing to attach to.

Two operational cautions. First, OSF requires the host institution’s electronic signature workflow to complete before the deadline, and institutional signatories are not always available at 1:45 pm on a deadline day — build in at least two working days. Second, the times NCN publishes are Polish local time; in September that is CEST, and NCN’s documents render it as 14:00.

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.

And, again, funding is all or nothing across the border. NCN will fund the Polish team only if the Lithuanian team is also funded.

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.

Preparation Strategy and Common Mistakes

Start from the partnership, not the project. DAINA rewards pairings with a real reason to exist — shared material, complementary instrumentation, a research question that spans both countries’ archives, ecosystems, or populations. A Lithuanian partner recruited in July to satisfy a bilateral requirement 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 in September that your intended PI will be on a long overseas posting is a project-ending problem, and it is entirely foreseeable in August.

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 in the first week, not the last.

Timeline: What Happens After You Submit

• 15 September 2026 — joint proposals close at RCL.
• 22 September 2026, 2 pm — Polish national proposals close in OSF.
• Autumn 2026 to spring 2027 — RCL organises and runs international expert evaluation; NCN completes eligibility verification on the Polish side.
• June 2027 — results announced.
• August 2027 — funded projects begin.

That is a gap of roughly nine months between submission and decision, and eleven to project start. Plan personnel around it: a post-doc you hope to recruit cannot be promised anything before June 2027, and the open recruitment requirement means the position must be advertised regardless.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a Polish team apply without a Lithuanian partner? No. DAINA funds joint Polish–Lithuanian projects, and the funding decision is coupled across both sides.

What if the Lithuanian team is scored well but the Polish part fails eligibility? The proposal does not proceed. Formal eligibility on the Polish side is checked by NCN and is not something RCL’s panel can override.

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 is the success rate? NCN has not published a headline success rate for DAINA 4, and previous editions’ rates are not stated on the programme page. Treat the PLN 26 million allocation and the PLN 1.3 million ceiling as the only reliable indication of how many Polish teams can be funded — arithmetically, on the order of twenty projects if most take the full ceiling, more if they do not.

How often does DAINA recur? Irregularly, at multi-year intervals. Results for earlier editions were announced in May 2018 (DAINA 1), May 2021 (DAINA 2), and October 2024 (DAINA 3). If you miss DAINA 4, the next edition is unlikely to be soon.

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://www.ncn.gov.pl/en/ogloszenia/konkursy/daina4
• 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.