91997E3685

WRITTEN QUESTION E-3685/97 by Mark Watts (PSE) to the Commission (19 November 1997)

Subject: Availability of grant information on the Internet

Is the Commission aware of any proposals to provide access to grant information by way of the Internet?

Does the Commission agree that this would be an effective and easy way for interested parties to seek initial information about the existence of and availability of grants?

Would it be possible to set up a system whereby interested bodies could type in a relevant word and the search engine could retrieve all grant information containing reference to that word? The information could then be read from the screen or downloaded as necessary.

Does the Commission agree that this would save an enormous amount of wasted time and paper sending out irrelevant claim forms?

Answer given by Mr Bangemann on behalf of the Commission (17 December 1997)

The Commission is indeed fully aware of the possibility to disseminate information about open calls for proposals, tenders and grant information.

Information about public calls for tenders and public calls for proposals launched by the Commission is available on the Tenders electronic daily (TED) database - the electronic version of supplement S of the Official journal. This database is offered via the European Commission host organisation in all official Community languages.

The service also comprises a user friendly web interface for Internet users which allows its selection of documents by keywords, by Member State, by date, etc. More than 100 000 documents are consulted from this database every month. In addition to this service the Commission operates a number of linked web servers. These servers provide free access to information about Commission initiatives in all domains. They also include the announcement of public calls for tenders and public calls for proposals as well as grant information. All these servers allow users to download the information on their personal computers.

The main server of the Commission is Europa (URL:http://europa.en.int) which provides information on all services of the Commission as well as links to web servers of the other institutions.

In addition the Commission operates the three web server I*M Europe (URL:http://www.echo.lu), Community research and development information service (CORDIS) (URL:http://www.cordis.lu) and information society project office (ISPO) (URL:http://www.ispo.cec.be) which serve specific target groups.