Collaborating with Charities
and Other Funders

The EME programme welcomes applications proposing joint funding arrangements. The EME Board requires you to clearly explain how the arrangement would work in practice and to be explicit about where responsibility lies contractually in terms of publication, and research governance issues etc. You should also note that the EME programme expects that any other organisations contributing funding would provide an ‘open grant' and not require any terms, conditions or limitations on the research. The EME programme would require assurance that the funding contribution would be guaranteed for the duration of the research, and a letter of intent should be included with the application.

The EME programme requires that the lead applicant must be in a UK academic (university) or NHS organisation. In addition satisfactory guarantees are required, before the study begins, that the design, conduct, analysis and reporting of the study will be completely independent of any commercial involvement. Any intellectual property rights resulting from the research would have to remain in the public domain at the end of the study.

You will need to address all of the above issues when proposing a joint funding arrangement.

If your application is successful, you should note that the EME programme will require sight of the contract between you and any other funding partners before any NIHR contract would be issued.

Please read Collaborating with Industry if there is commercial involvement in the study.