eContentplus programme

Period: 2005-2008

Budget: EUR 149 million

The eContentplus programme focuses on stimulating the development of digital content for services in areas of public interest – geographic information, cultural, scientific and educational content. It has an enabling role: it contributes to creating better conditions for accessing, using, reusing and exploiting digital material, based on which added-value products and services can be built across Europe.

eContentplus addresses specific market areas where development has been slow: geographic content (as a key constituent of public sector content), educational content, cultural, scientific and scholarly content.

The programme also supports EU-wide co-ordination of collections in libraries, museums and archives and the preservation of digital collections so as to ensure availability of cultural, scholarly and scientific assets for future use.

Participation in the programme is open to legal entities established in the EU Member States and in EFTA States, which are contracting parties to the EEA Agreement (Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). Legal entities established in the acceding countries (Bulgaria and Romania), Candidate Countries (Croatia and Turkey) and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (under a Stabilisation and Association agreement) can also be eligible, however, will only receive funding if a bilateral agreement with the relevant country has been concluded to this effect.

Eligibility requirements for all participants:

• The consortium must include content providers and users

• The selected topic should have a European dimension, notably should have an impact on the highest possible number of users and the highest number of European Member States, particularly New Member States.

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