ZonMw
ZonMw (Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development)
ZonMw funds health research and care innovation in the Netherlands on behalf of the Ministry of Health (VWS) and NWO, running roughly 200 calls a year. Flagship open schemes include the ZonMw Open Competition (up to €800,000 for team science in fundamental biomedical research) and Off Road (€100,000 for high-risk ideas); ZonMw also administers the NWO Talent Programme (Veni, Vidi, Vici) for the health and medical domain.
Evaluation Criteria
- 1Staff completeness and compliance check first, an incomplete application gets exactly one repair chance
- 2Independent external referees score scientific quality (the number of referees scales with grant size)
- 3Right of reply: anonymised referee reports are sent to you for a written rebuttal before the committee meets
- 4A programme committee ranks proposals on quality plus relevance (patient and practice relevance carries real weight, often assessed with experience experts); shortlisted Open Competition and Talent applicants are interviewed
Proposal Structure
- •Submit via the main applicant's personal Mijn ZonMw account before 14:00 on deadline day, attachments complete, signed where required, and free of PDF security restrictions
- •Science calls (Open Competition, Off Road, Talent) are written in English, ZonMw checks the prescribed language per call
- •Budget per the rules: personnel at VSNU/NFU salary tables, open access publication costs as their own line, no bench fee in Talent Programme budgets, and projects of €125,000 or more need an audit opinion with the final financial report
- •Only requested attachments, letters of support or other unsolicited annexes are not allowed
Common Mistakes
- ×Submitting at 14:05, the Mijn ZonMw deadline is a hard cutoff, plan the internal sign-off chain backwards from 14:00
- ×Locked or security-restricted PDFs, these fail the compliance check
- ×Adding unsolicited letters of support, explicitly disallowed in Open Competition rules
- ×Treating the rebuttal as a formality, the committee may deviate from referees but needs your reply as ammunition
- ×Underplaying patient or practice relevance, relevance is scored alongside quality in most ZonMw programmes
Success Tips
- ✓Use the one repair chance wisely if offered, but aim to never need it
- ✓Answer every referee point in the rebuttal with evidence, new arguments from the committee trigger a second reply round, so precision early pays twice
- ✓For Veni in the health domain, remember the cap: two submission attempts per researcher, make the first one count
- ✓Anchor the relevance narrative on a named care setting, patient group, or policy user, mirror how the committee's experience experts read proposals
Frequently Asked Questions
+What is the relationship between ZonMw and NWO?
ZonMw operates in partnership with NWO's Medical Sciences domain and realises the NWO Talent Programme (Veni, Vidi, Vici) for healthcare research and medical sciences: you apply via Mijn ZonMw, but the scheme and budgets are NWO's.
+How much does the ZonMw Open Competition fund?
Up to €800,000 per project over 4-5 years, with an optional investment module of €100,000-€250,000 on top (maximum €1.05M). The 2024 round funded 29 teams for €24M. A mid-career "Open Competition, M" pilot starts in 2027.
+Can foreign researchers apply?
Eligibility is per call, but projects must be embedded at a Dutch research institution, the Talent Programme requires an embedding guarantee from the Dutch host. Foreign researchers with Dutch embedding can apply.
+What are ZonMw's open access rules?
Open access has been mandatory since 1 January 2021 under Plan S: CC-BY 4.0 licence, with deposit in Europe PMC for rounds from April 2021. Open access costs are budgetable in the grant.
+How does the Veni resubmission cap work in the health domain?
A researcher may submit a Veni application a maximum of two times, across rounds. Other ZonMw programmes set their own per-call resubmission rules, check the call text.
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