As of 1 January 2023, the DFG provides final report templates for many programmes so as to help you prepare the report. These are mandatory for projects that are approved from this date onwards. These templates replace the previously used instructions and can be found here. For projects approved prior to this date, the final reports can be written voluntarily according to these templates or based on the instructions contained in the relevant funding guidelines. For programmes where a template is not yet available, the instructions contained in the relevant funding guidelines apply.

The templates are divided into a public part and a non-public part. The public part of the report is for publication in a repository.

Please submit your report as a single document in PDF format without password protection or access restrictions via the DFG’s elan portal. Until further notice, final reports for Collaborative Research Centres (CRC) must be submitted on a USB stick by post, via the DFG’s file exchange portal or via a secure download portal provided by your university.

The award letter informs you of the date by which the report must be received. The deadline is normally three months after the end of the project. If delays occur during the course of the project, please contact the DFG department responsible for your project to have the deadline for submission of the final report rescheduled. You may also want to apply for a cost-neutral extension of the project duration: see here for details.

Your final report is checked by the DFG Head Office for completeness and compliance with formal requirements and then usually undergoes an external content review. We will inform you of any relevant points that arise from the review. Final reports on consortium projects are also submitted to the respective statutory bodies responsible for the programme so that information from the reports and/or expert reviews can be incorporated in discussions on the further development of the funding instruments.

Final reports must always contain a generally comprehensible summary. This appears in the DFG project database GEPRIS together with references to publications that have emerged from the project. If you object to publication, you may submit your objection in written form along with the final report.

If your final report follows the new template, you can publish the public part of your report in a repository after it has been approved. If you decide to do so, please subsequently provide the DFG with the Persistent Identification Number (PID) of your report. This is possible exclusively via the DFG’s elan portal. See here for more information on the publication of your final report.

As a rule, final reports are externally reviewed. If the reviewers have any queries about the report, we will ask you to respond. Under coordinated programmes, your report is also submitted to the statutory body. Following the review and, where applicable, the referral to the responsible body, we will inform you of the approval in written form. Your reporting obligation is then deemed to have been fulfilled.

As of 1 January 2023, the DFG provides final report templates for many programmes so as to help you prepare the report. You will find the templates here. Here the report is structured into a public and a non-public report part. The public part of the report is for publication in a repository. Publication is voluntary and is undertaken by the report authors after the report has been approved. It is expressly welcomed by the DFG. The aim of publishing the report is to make the positive and negative scientific results arrived at in the project freely available to the subject-specialist communities and the public outside the usual publication channels.

The report authors decide which repository is most suitable, but it should meet certain subject-specific and generic standards. See here for recommendations regarding suitable repositories and detailed instructions for publication.

The repositories assign a Persistent Identification Number (PID) to the published part of the report. We kindly ask you to send this to us. An input mask for this purpose is available on the DFG’s elan portal.

The PID appears in the DFG project database GEPRIS together with the generally comprehensible summary and further references to publications that have emerged from the project.

We ask you to submit the PID to us. An input mask for this purpose is available on the DFG’s elan portal.

The PID appears in the DFG project database GEPRIS together with the generally comprehensible summary and further references to publications that have emerged from the project.

By accepting the grant, you undertake to write and submit a final report. If a final report is not submitted despite repeated reminders, the DFG may sanction the funding recipient responsible by imposing a two-year ban on proposal submission. In the case of coordinated programmes, this applies to the spokesperson or the coordinators. The ban on proposal submission ends on expiry of this period or as soon as the report is submitted. If it appears that you will not be able to submit the report by the deadline, please contact the DFG department responsible for your project.

In this case, submission of a final report on DFG funding is usually voluntary. You can do so to report on the results of the previous funding period and put these in the public domain. Under the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) and Research Training Group (RTG) programmes, there is a requirement to submit a scaled-down final report. See the relevant CRC and RTG templates for details. Since the project results have already been reviewed as part of the renewal proposal, the DFG approves the report without a new review being carried out.

Please submit your report as a single document in PDF format without password protection or access restrictions via the DFG’s elan portal. Until further notice, CRC reports must be submitted on a USB stick, via the DFG’s file exchange portal or via a secure download portal provided by your university.

You can publish the public part of the report in a repository and submit the Persistent Identification Number (PID) to the DFG. This will appear in GEPRIS together with the generally comprehensible summary and references to the publications that have emerged from the project. This ensures that the results of DFG funding become publicly available.

Please be sparing in your use of personal data. If you transmit third-party personal data, you warrant that you are authorised to do so under data protection law. Please note the DFG’s data protection notice for research funding, which you can access here. Where applicable, please also forward this information to those individuals whose data will be processed by the DFG due to their involvement in your project.

Personal data in connection with the qualification of early-career investigators may only appear in the non-public part of the report.

We also ask you to take care not to transmit any particularly sensitive personal data if at all possible. This includes data “revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and (...) genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation”. [Quoted from: Art. 9 (1) GDPR]

Should the communication of particularly sensitive personal data be unavoidable, you must complete and submit DFG form 73.01. Only share information that you feel is relevant and do not mention information about third parties, or at least as little as possible.