Analysis of grant proposals confirms consistency of EU funding agencies’ peer-review process after organisational changes*

In 2014, the European Union transitioned from the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to Horizon 2020. Following this transition, a meta-analysis explored the impact of two changes made to the peer-review process in the evaluation of grant proposals, for reasons of simplification. It concluded that the outcomes of the process remained stable following these two organisational changes implemented.

The first change was a reduction in the evaluation criteria applied to assess applications from four or more to three: excellence, impact, and implementation. Policymakers wanted to align the evaluation criteria of all the actions in the framework programmes for simplification purposes. Consequently, the additional derogation for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) actions (formerly MCA) was removed.

The second change involved a move from in-person to virtual meetings, to reduce the number of consensus meetings held in Brussels. It was also part of an effort to reduce the cost and carbon footprint of said meetings, and to ease the burden placed on reviewers.

The study was published on 13 January as a feature article on eLife, and it aimed to address the lack of substantial research into funding agencies’ use of peer review for the evaluation of grant applications and proposals. The analysis involved 75,000 MSCA grant proposals between 2007 and 2018.

David Pina, from the Research Executive Agency’s unit Spreading Excellence, Widening Participation, Science with and for Society, the first and corresponding author of the study, underlined the value of these analyses ‘to help us monitor the consistency and reliability of our activities, which will ultimately assist policy makers with evidence-based material’.

The other authors of the study were Ivan Buljan (Department for Research in Biomedicine and Health, University of Split, School of Medicine), Darko Hren (Department of Psychology, University of Split, School of Humanities and Social Sciences) and Ana Marušić (Department for Research in Biomedicine and Health, University of Split, School of Medicine).

Prof. Cassidy Sugimito, Chair of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) was the reviewing editor for the article on the study published on eLife.

*Disclaimer: All views expressed in this article are strictly those of the authors and may under no circumstances be regarded as an official position of the Research Executive Agency or the European Commission.