NWO, the Netherlands' national research council, has opened the Large-scale Research Infrastructure (LSRI) Upgrade 2025 funding call, according to a notice posted on nwo.nl.

The page carries the headline "Call open: Large-scale Research Infrastructure (LSRI) - Upgrade 2025." Budget figures, submission deadlines, and eligibility terms — the parameters a laboratory needs before deciding whether to bid — were not contained in the public news-channel version of the notice at press time. NWO publishes those in the full call text on its applicant portal.

The LSRI line sits inside NWO's competitive funding architecture and supports upgrades to shared scientific facilities that exceed single-institution scale: telescopes, particle-physics installations, high-performance computing systems, imaging platforms, cleanrooms, and similar instruments serving multi-team user programs. The "Upgrade" track, named in the call title, targets modifications and modernization of facilities already supported under the National Roadmap for Large-scale Research Infrastructure rather than greenfield construction.

What does this round change for applicants?

Principal investigators preparing bids should expect the standard LSRI package: a call text setting budget caps per category, a list of eligible upgrade types, co-financing ratios, and a submission window running through 2025. The agency's call page at nwo.nl will carry the full text once published; the news-channel notice serves as an alert that drafting can begin.

Groups intending to apply typically coordinate co-applicants, secure institutional board support letters, and line up technical specifications from instrument operators before the deadline. Missing from the public notice were the deadline date and the maximum grant size — both of which set the practical scope of any single application.

How do upgrades differ from new builds?

The Upgrade track covers improvements to equipment that already exists. Upgrades typically fall into four buckets: detector or sensor replacements that extend instrument sensitivity, control-system modernizations that bring legacy installations onto current software stacks, capacity expansions that increase throughput or beam-time allocations, and life-extending overhauls on instruments nearing end-of-warranty status.

Proposals that request funding for a net-new facility — one not previously on the NWO roadmap — usually do not belong in the Upgrade line. PIs should verify the instrument status before drafting the case for support.

Why this fits NWO's wider calendar

The LSRI line is one of several instruments in NWO's research-grant architecture. The Veni-Vidi-Vici scheme funds individual researchers at defined career stages; the Gravitation programme supports collaborative multi-university research; the LSRI line keeps the physical and computational infrastructure on which all of those awards depend functioning. A delayed facility hampers downstream grants.

Dutch research managers tend to coordinate LSRI bids with parallel funding lines from the European Research Council and Horizon Europe framework, since shared facilities often pull capital from multiple sources. The 2025 LSRI call, once its terms are posted, will slot into that layered planning cycle.

What should laboratories do now?

Applicants can begin preparatory work in parallel with the notice. Technical specifications from instrument operators, institutional support letters, and co-applicant commitments consume most of the lead time before a Dutch competitive-funding deadline. With the title now public, PIs running facilities likely to fit the track should expect the full call text on nwo.nl and plan around a 2025 submission window.

The LSRI line sits alongside NWO's talent and collaboration schemes as the bucket laboratories turn to when a single grant must cover a multi-year technical upgrade. The next scheduled milestone is NWO's publication of the full call terms on nwo.nl.