| The aim of CERTAIN is to facilitate integration of the EU New Member States (NMS) and other Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) into the established research and development community of the European Union. Due to the poor success rate of NMS partners under the first two calls of the Sustainable Transport Programme of the Sixth Framework Programme, three clustered STREP proposals on road materials, pavements and structures are being prepared by the national road research institutes of three NMS.WP 1 will provide the necessary clustering environment for the three STREPs and the relevant on-going projects in which they will work in synergy to provide maximum output for the NMS and CEEC without duplicating their work. Language is a major obstacle for efficient dissemination of European research results in the NMS and CEEC.Thus, apart from four international events, WP2 will organise six workshops in mother languages to attract much higher number of the interested end-users. For the same reason, it will translate into the mother languages some of the key documents of the three projects. Until today, partners from some NMS have taken part in the EU Framework projects on road infrastructure research, but without major responsibilities.WP 3 will organise training courses for leaders of European research projects, in order that partners from NMS and CEEC will play a much more active role in the future European research activities. WP4 will work on dissemination of results. It will prepare a consistent multi-lingual Internet platform for the three projects and manage the common end-users group (road administrations, designers, construction companies, industry etc.).This will provide an effective link between the road research activities at the European level and the implementation at local level. Partners in CERTAIN are the three NMS project leaders and FEHRL, the Association of Europe's National Road Research Centres. |