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Article History

Received: 1 April 2025

Accepted: 10 July 2026

First Online: 15 July 2026

Ethics

Competing interests: The author declares no competing interests.

Ethical approval: This study involved interviews with researchers from ZRC SAZU focusing on their professional experiences with EU FPs. The interview process was initiated in 2022 in the context of a broader institutional strategy-development exercise concerning participation in European research and innovation projects. Because the process involved interviews with researchers about their professional experiences, the study design was submitted to the institution’s ethics and integrity advisor before data collection. As the study did not focus on sensitive personal information and involved researchers who were familiar with research procedures, the advisor concluded that formal ethics approval was not required. All research procedures involving human participants were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the Declaration of Helsinki and relevant national regulations. These steps included anonymisation, data processing, and secondary data analysis for scholarly purposes. The later academic use of the interview material for this article was based on additional permission from all interviewees and was analytically separated from the original strategy-development process.

Informed consent: All participants in this study were invited by email and provided written informed consent prior to the interviews, which were conducted between 26 January and 17 March 2022. The consent process was managed by two external experts who were tasked with developing a strategy to increase ZRC SAZU’s engagement with the EU FPs. Participants were informed about the purpose of the study, their right to withdraw at any time, the voluntary nature of their participation and the use of their data. All interviews were anonymised, and pseudonyms were assigned. After transcription and prior to secondary analysis for this article, explicit additional permission was obtained from all interviewees to further use the data for academic publication, confirming that they were fully aware of the scope of data use. Data were processed and stored in accordance with institutional GDPR-compliant procedures, and participants were assured of full confidentiality.

Use of AI tools: During manuscript preparation, the author used ChatGPT to improve sentence structure and syntax, and InstaText and Paperpal for grammar and language editing. These tools were used solely to support language revision.