Spending Wisely: European Peer Review Guide For Funding Research

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 28 Apr 2011 - 3:00 PDT


The first international guidelines for peer reviewing research grants are published today by the European Science Foundation (ESF). The European Peer Review Guide outlines principles for the safeguarding of fairness and credibility in peer review as agreed by Europe's major research funders.

Coordinated by the ESF, the Guide is the product of a joint effort between more than 30 national funding and performing organisations from 23 countries, the European Research Council (ERC), European Commission and Research Executive Agency (REA).

Each funding organisation works with their own individual context, programmes, and guidelines but they face the same challenge: assessing quality and potentialities of research proposals. The European Peer Review Guide identifies five pillars for supporting and sharing good practices of peer review: core principles, quality assurance, process integrity, governance structure and methodology.

"By virtue of involving human judgement, even the same peer review procedures can have variable outcomes," said Dr Cristina Marras from the Italian National Research Council (CNR). "Peer review is the most widely used method for distributing research funding. So the five pillars for good practice described in the Guide can help us minimise this inherent variability as much as possible, furthermore, it fosters harmonisation in international peer review."

"Excellence in research depends on the quality of the procedures used to select the proposals for funding. We hope that this document can act as a central reference for all funding organisations, not just in Europe," added Dr Marc Heppener, Director of Science and Strategy Development at the European Science Foundation. "It is a first step towards European level peer review, enabling the scientific community to operate in a global context."

Each proposal is scientifically unique, and in international funding programmes, they originate from a wide range of different research cultures. In addition to the quality of the basic procedures, there are other challenges such as assessing multidisciplinary proposals, and correctly approaching "risky" proposals in frontier research. The Guide has been designed to address the assessment procedures of different funding instruments including large scale programmes such as Joint Programming.

The guide is based on a comprehensive survey that benchmarked and identified good practice amongst the many different systems and criteria currently in use in European countries. This includes research funding and performing organisations, councils, private foundations and charities, which all have roles in evaluating research applications.

The European Peer Review Guide is available online here.

The Heads of the European Research Councils (EUROHORCs) and the European Science Foundation (ESF) recognised in their Vision on a Globally Competitive ERA and their Road Map for Actions the need to develop common peer review systems that are useable, credible and reliable for all funding agencies. To identify the good practices of peer review, the governing bodies of both organisations invited the ESF Member Organisation Forum on peer review to compile a Peer Review Guide to be disseminated to their members and other interested stakeholders in Europe and beyond.

Source:
European Science Foundation (ESF)

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