Ken Emond, Head of Research Awards of the British Academy, came to visit the University of Nottingham the other week to talk about the various and nefarious research funding schemes that are on offer from the British Academy. To make an event of it, my colleagues in the Centre for Advanced Studies also arranged for various internal beneficiaries of the Academy’s largesse to come and talk about the role that Academy funding had had in their research career. I hope no-one minds if I repeat some of the things that were said – there was no mention of ‘Chatham House’ rules or of ‘confidential learning agreements’, and I don’t imagine that Ken gives privileged information to the University of Nottingham alone, no matter how wonderful we are.
Much of what funders’ representatives tend to say during institutional visits or AMRA conferences is pretty much identical to the information already available on their website in one form or another, but it’s interesting how many academics seem to prefer to hear the information in person rather than read it in their own time. And it’s good to put a face to names, and faces to institutions. Although I think I shall probably always share Phil Ward‘s mental image of the BA as an exclusive Rowley Birkin QC-style private members club. But it’s good to have a reminder of what’s on offer, and have an opportunity to ask questions.
I met Ken very briefly at the ARMA conference in 2010, and his enthusiasm for the Small Grants Scheme then (and now) was obvious. I was very surprised when it was scrapped, and it seems likely that this was imposed rather than freely chosen. However, it’s great to see it back again, and this time including support for conference funding to disseminate the project findings. It seems the call is going to be at least annual, with no decision taken yet on whether there will be a second call this year, as in previous years.
It seems much more sensible than having separate schemes for projects and for conference funding. It’s unlikely that we’re going to see a return of the BA Overseas Conference Scheme, but…. it was quite a lot of work in writing and assessing for really very small amounts of money. Although having said that, when I was at Keele those very small amounts of money really did help us send researchers to prestigious conferences (especially in the States) they wouldn’t otherwise have attended.
One of the questions asked was about the British Academy’s attitude to demand management, of the kind that the EPSRC have introduced and that the ESRC are proposing. The response was that they currently have no plans in this direction – they don’t think that any institutions are submitting an excessive number of applications.
Although the British Academy has some of the lowest success rates in town for its major schemes, they are all light touch applications – certainly compared to the Research Councils. Mid-Career and Post-Doc Fellowships both have an outline stage, and the Senior Research Fellowships application form is hardly more taxing than a Small Grant one. Presumably they’re also quick and easy to review – I wonder how many of those a referee could get through in the time it took them to review a single Research Council application? Which does raise the suggestion from Mavan, a commenter on one of my previous posts, about cutting the ESRC application form dramatically.
But… it’s possible that the relative brevity of the application forms is itself increasing the number of applications, and that’s certainly something that the ESRC were concerned about when considering their own move to outline stage applications.
I guess a funding scheme could be credible and sustainable with a low success rate and a low ‘overhead’ cost of writing and reviewing applications or a high success rate with a high overhead cost. The problem is when were get to where we are at the moment with the ESRC, with low success rates and high overhead costs.
There’s a very strange article in the Times Higher today which claims that the ESRC’s latest “grant application figures raise questions about its future”.
Er…. do they? Seriously? Why?
It’s true that success rates are a problem – down to 16% overall, and 12% for the Research Grants Scheme (formerly Standard Grants. According to the article, these are down from 17% and 14% from the year before. It’s also true that RCUK stated in 2007 that 20% should be the minimum success rates. But this long term decline in success rates – plus a cut in funding in real terms – is exactly why the ESRC has started a ‘demand management’ strategy.
A comment attributed to one academic (which could have been a rhetorical remark taken out of context) appears to equate the whole thing to a lottery,and calls for the whole thing to be scrapped and the funding distributed via the RAE/REF. This strikes me as an odd view, though not one, I’m sure, confined to the person quoted. But it’s not a majority view, not even among the select number of academics approached for comments. All of the other academics named in the article seem to be calling for more funding for social sciences, so it would probably be legitimate to wonder why the focus of the article is about “questions” about the ESRC’s “future”, rather than calls for more funding. But perhaps that’s just how journalism works. It certainly got my attention.
While I don’t expect these calls for greater funding for social science research will be heard in the current politico-economic climate, it’s hard to see that abolishing the ESRC and splitting its budget will achieve very much. The great strength of the dual funding system is that while the excellence of the Department of TopFiveintheRAE at the University of Russell deserves direct funding, it’s also possible for someone at the Department of X at Poppleton University to get substantial funding for their research if their research proposal is outstanding enough. Maybe your department gets nothing squared from HEFCE as a result of the last RAE, but if your idea is outstanding it could be you – to use a lottery slogan. This strikes me as a massively important principle – even if in practice, most of it will go to the Universities of Russell. As a community of social science scholars, calling for the ESRC to be abolished sounds like cutting of the nose to spite the face.
Yes, success rates are lower than we’d like, and yes, there is a strong element of luck in getting funded. But it’s inaccurate to call it a “lottery”. If your application isn’t of outstanding quality, it won’t get funded. If it is, it still might not get funded, but… er… that’s not a lottery. All of the other academics named in the article seem to be calling for more funding for the social sciences.
According to the ESRC’s figures between 2007 and 2011, 9% of Standard Grant applications were either withdrawn or rejected at ‘office’ stage for various reasons. 13% fell at the referee stage (beta or reject grades), and 21% fell at the assessor stage (alpha minus). So… 43% of applications never even got as far as the funding panel before being screened out on quality or eligibility grounds.
So… while the headline success rate might be 12%, the success rates for fundable applications are rather better. 12 funded out of 100 applications is 12%, but 12 funded out of 57 of the 100 of the applications that are competitive is about 28%. That’s what I tell my academic colleagues – if your application is outstanding, then you’re looking at 1 in 4. If it’s not outstanding, but merely interesting, or valuable, or would ‘add to the literature’, then look to other (increasingly limited) options.
So…. we need the ESRC. It would be a disaster for social science research if it were not to have a Research Council. We may not agree with everything it does and all of the decisions it makes, we may be annoyed and frustrated when they won’t fund our projects, but we need a funder of social science with money to invest in individual research projects, rather than merely in excellent Departments.
It won't just be Fabio getting sanctioned if the referee's comments aren't favourable.
Previously in this series of posts on ESRC Demand Management I’ve discussed the background to the current unsustainable situation and aspects of the initial changes, such as the greater use of sifting and outline stages, and the new ban on (uninvited) resubmissions. In this post I’ll be looking forward to the possible measures that might be introduced in a year or so’s time should application numbers not drop substantially….
When the ESRC put their proposals out to consultation, there were four basic strategies proposed.
Charging for applications
Quotas for numbers of applications per institution
Sanctions for institutions
Sanctions for individual researchers
Reading in between the lines of the demand management section of the presentation that the ERSC toured the country with in the spring, charging for applications is a non-starter. Even in the consultation documents, this option only appeared to be included for the sake of completeness – it was readily admitted that there was no evidence that it would have the desired effect.
I think we can also all-but-discount quotas as an option. The advantage of quotas is that it would allow the ESRC to precisely control the maximum number of applications that could be submitted. Problem is, it’s the nuclear option, and I think it would be sensible to try less radical options first. If their call for better self-regulation and internal peer review within institutions fails, and then sanctions schemes are tried and fail, then (and only then) should they be thinking about quotas. Sanctions (and the threat of sanctions) are a seek to modify application submission behaviour, while quotas pretty much dictate it. There may yet be a time when Quotas are necessary, though I really hope not.
What’s wrong with Quotas, then? Well, there will be difficulties in assigning quotas fairly to institutions, in spite of complex plans for banding and ‘promotion’ and ‘relegation’ from the bands. That’ll lead to a lot of game playing, and it’s also likely that there will be a lot of mucking around with the lead applicant. If one of my colleagues has a brilliant idea and we’re out of Quota, well, maybe we’ll find someone at an institution that isn’t and ask them to lead. I can imagine a lot of bickering over who should spend their quota on submitting an application with a genuinely 50-50 institutional split.
But my main worry is that institutions are not good at comparing applications from different disciplines. If we have applications from (say) Management and Law vying for the last precious quota slot, how is the institution to choose between them? Even if it has experts who are not on the project team, they will inevitably have a conflict of interest – there would be a worry that they would support their ‘team’. We could give it a pretty good cognate discipline review, but I’m not confident we would always get the decision right. It won’t take long before institutions start teaming up to provide external preliminary peer review of each other’s applications, and before you know it, we end up just shifting the burden from post-submission to pre-submission for very little gain.
In short, I think quotas are a last resort idea, and shouldn’t be seriously considered unless we end up in a situation where a combination of (a) the failure of other demand management measures, and/or (b) significant cuts in the amount of funding available.
Which leaves sanctions – either on individual researchers or on their institutions. The EPSRC has had a policy of researcher sanctions for some time, and that’s had quite a considerable effect. I don’t think it’s so much through sanctioning people and taking them out of the system so much as a kind of chill or placebo effect, whereby greater self-selection is taking place. Once there’s a penalty for throwing in applications and hoping that some stick, people will stop.
As I argued previously, I think a lot of that pressure for increased submissions is down to institutions rather than individuals, who in many cases are either following direct instructions and expectations, or at least a very strong steer. As a result, I was initially in favour of a hybrid system of sanctions where both individual researchers and institutions could potentially be sanctioned. Both bear a responsibility for the application, and both are expected to put their name to it. But after discussions internally, I’ve been persuaded that individual sanctions are the way to go, in order to have a consistent approach with the EPSRC, and with the other Research Councils, who I think are very likely to have their own version. While the formulae may vary according to application profiles, as much of a common approach as possible should be adopted, unless of course there are overwhelming reasons why one of the RCs that I’m less familiar with should be different.
For me, the big issue is not whether we end up with individual, institutional, or hybrid sanctions, but whether the ESRC go ahead with plans to penalise co-investigators (and/or their institutions) as well as PIs in cases where an application does not reach the required standard.
This is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea and I would urge them to drop it. The EPSRC don’t do it, and it’s not clear why the ESRC want to. For me, the co-I issue is more important than which sanction model we end up with.
Most of the ESRC’s documents on demand management are thoughtful and thorough. They’re written to inform the consultation exercise rather than dictate a solution, and I think the author(s) should be – on the whole – congratulated on their work. Clearly a lot of hard work has gone into the proposals, which given the seriousness of the proposals is only right. However, nowhere is there to be found any kind of argument or justification that I can find for why co-investigators (insert your own ‘and/or institutions’ from here on) should be regarded as equally culpable.
I guess the argument (which the ESRC doesn’t make) might be that an application will be given yet more careful consideration if more than the principal investigator has something to lose. At the moment, I don’t do a great deal if an application is led from elsewhere – I offer my services, and sometimes that offer is taken up, sometimes it isn’t. But no doubt I’d be more forceful in my ‘offer’ if a colleague or my university could end up with a sanctions strike against us. Further, I’d probably be recommending that none of my academic colleagues get involved in an application without it going through our own rigorous internal peer review processes. Similarly, I’d imagine that academics would be much more careful about what they allowed their name to be put to, and would presumably take a more active role in drafting the application. Both institutions and individual academics, can, I think, be guilty of regarding an application led from elsewhere as being a free roll of the dice. But we’re taking action on this – or at least I am.
The problem is that these benefits are achieved (if they are achieved at all) at the cost of abandoning basic fairness. It’s just not clear to me why an individual/institution with only a minor role in a major project should be subject to the same penalty as the principal investigator and/or the institution that failed to spot that the application was unfundable. It’s not clear to me why the career-young academic named as co-I on a much more senior colleague’s proposal should be held responsible for its poor quality. I understand that there’s a term in aviation – cockpit gradient – which refers to the difference in seniority between Pilot and Co-Pilot. A very senior Pilot and a very junior co-Pilot is a bad mix because the junior will be reluctant to challenge the senior. I don’t understand why someone named as co-I for an advisory role – on methodology perhaps, or for a discrete task, should bear the same responsibility. And so on and so forth. One response might be to create a new category of research team member less responsible than a ‘co-investigator’ but more involved in the project direction (or part of the project direction) than a ‘researcher’, but do we really want to go down the road of redefining categories?
Now granted, there are proposals where the PI is primus inter pares among a team of equally engaged and responsible investigators, where there is no single, obvious candidate for the role of PI. In those circumstances, we might think it would be fair for all of them to pay the penalty. But I wonder what proportion of applications are like this, with genuine joint leadership? Even in such cases, every one of those joint leaders ought to be happy to be named as PI, because they’ve all had equal input. But the unfairness inherent in only one person getting a strike against their name (and other(s) not), is surely much less unfair than the examples above?
As projects become larger, with £200k (very roughly, between two and two and a half person-years including overheads and project expenses) now being the minimum, the complex, multi-armed, innovative, interdisciplinary project is likely to be come more and more common, because that’s what the ESRC says that it wants to fund. But the threat of a potential sanction (or step towards sanction) for every last co-I involved is going to be a) a massive disincentive to large-scale collaboration, b) a logistical and organisational nightmare, or c) both.
Institutionally, it makes things very difficult. Do we insist that every last application involving one of our academics goes through our peer review processes? Or do we trust the lead institution? Or do we trust some (University of Russell) but not others (Poppleton University)? How does the PI manage writing and guiding the project through various different approval processes, with the danger that team members may withdraw (or be forced to withdraw) by their institution? I’d like to think that in the event of sanctions on co-Is and/or institutions that most Research Offices would come up with some sensible proposals for managing the risk of junior-partnerdom in a proportionate manner, but it only takes one or two to start demanding to see everything and to run everything to their timetable to make things very difficult indeed.
In part one of this week fortnight long series of posts on the ESRC and “demand management”, I attempted to sketch out some context. Briefly, we’re here because demand has increased while the available funds have remained static at best, and are now declining in real terms. Phil Ward and Paul Benneworth have both added interesting comments – Phil has a longer professional memory than I do, and Paul makes some very useful comments from the perspective of a researcher starting his career during the period in question. If you read the previous post before their comments appeared, I’d recommend going back and having a read.
It’s easy to think of “demand management” as something that’s at least a year away, but there are some changes that are being implemented straight away – this post is about outline applications and “sifting”. Next I’ll talk about the ban on (uninvited) resubmissions.
Greater use of outline stages for managed mode schemes (i.e pretty much everything except open call Research Grants), for example, seems very sensible to me, provided that the application form is cut down sufficiently to represent a genuine time and effort saving for individuals and institutions, while still allowing applicants enough space to make a case. It’s also important that reviewers treat outline applications as just that, and are sensitive to space constraints. I understand that the ESRC are developing a new grading scheme for outline applications, which is a very good thing. At outline stage, I would imagine that they’re looking for ideas that are of the right size in terms of scale and ambition, and at least some evidence that (a) the research team has the right skills and (b) that granting them more time and space to lay out their arguments will result in a competitive application.
With Standard Grants (now known as Research Grants, as there are no longer ‘large’ or ‘small’ grants), there will be “greater internal sifting by ESRC staff”. I don’t know if this is in place yet, but I understand that there’s a strong possibility that this might not be done by academics. I’m very relaxed about that – in fact, I welcome it – though I can imagine that some academics will be appalled. But…. the fact is that about a third of the applications the ESRC receives are “uncompetitive”, which is a lovely British way of saying unfundable. Not good enough. Where all these applications are coming from I’ve no idea, and while I don’t think any of them are being submitted on my watch, it would be an act of extreme hubris to declare that absolutely. However, I strongly suspect that they’re largely coming from universities that don’t have a strong research culture and/or don’t have high quality research support and/or are just firing off as many applications as possible in a mistaken belief that the ESRC is some kind of lottery.
I’d back myself to pick out the unfundable third in a pile of applications. I wouldn’t back myself to pick the grant recipients, but even then I reckon I’d get close. I can differentiate between what I don’t understand and what doesn’t make sense with a fair degree of accuracy, and while I’m no expert on research methods, I know when there isn’t a good account of methods, or when it’s not explained or justified. I can spot a Case for Support that is 80% literature review and only 20% new proposal. I can tell when the research questions(s) subtly change from section to section. And I’d back others with similar roles to me to be able to do the same – if we can’t tell the difference between a sinner and a winner…. why are research intensive universities bothering to employ us?
And if I can do it with a combination of some academic background (MPhil political philosophy) and professional experience, I’m sure others could too, including ESRC staff. They’d only have to sort the no-hopers from the rest, and if a few no-hopers slip through, or if a few low quality fundable some-hopers-but-a-very-long-way-down-the-lists drop out at that stage, it would make very little difference. Unless, of course, one of the demand management sanction options is introduced, at which point the notion of non-academics making decisions that could lead to individual or institutional becomes a little more complicated. But again, I think I’d back myself to spot grant applications that should not have been submitted, even if I wouldn’t necessarily want a sanctions decision depending on my judgement alone.
Even if they were to go with a very conservative policy of only sifting out applications which, say, three ESRC staff think is dreadful, that could still make a substantial difference to the demands on academic reviewers. I guess that’s the deal – you submit to a non-academic having some limited judgement role over your application, and in return, they stop sending you hopeless applications to review.
Developing appropriate demand management strategies is not a new challenge
The ESRC have some important decisions to make this summer about what to do about “demand management”. The consultation on these changes closed in June, and I understand about 70 responses were received. Whatever they come up with is unlikely to be popular, but I think there’s no doubt that some kind of action is required.
I’ve got a few thoughts on this, and I’m going to split them across a number of blog posts over the next week or so. I’m going to talk about the context, the steps already taken, the timetable, possible future steps, and how I think we in the “grant getting community” should respond.
* * * * *
According to the presentation that the ESRC presented around the country this spring, the number of applications received has increased by about a third over the last five years. For most of those five years, there was no more money, and because of the flat cash settlement at the last comprehensive spending review, there’s now effectively less money than before. As a result, success rates have plummeted, down to about 13% on average. There are a number of theories as to why application rates have risen. One hypothesis is that there are just more social science researchers than ever before, and while I’m sure that’s a factor, I think there’s something else going on.
I wonder if the current problem has its roots in the last RAE, On the whole, it wasn’t good in brute financial terms for social science – improving quality in relative terms (unofficial league tables) or absolute terms was far from a guarantee of maintaining levels of funding. A combination of protection for the STEM subjects, grade inflation rising standards, and increased numbers of staff FTE returns shrunk the unit of resource. The units that did best in brute financial terms, it seems to me, were those that were able to maintain or improve quality, but submit a much greater number of staff FTEs. The unit of assessment that I was closest to in the last RAE achieved just this.
What happened next? Well, I think a lot of institutions and academic units looked at a reduction in income, looked at the lucrative funding rules of research council funding, pondered briefly, and then concluded that perhaps the ESRC (and other research councils) would giveth where RAE had taken away.
Problem is, I think everyone had the same idea.
On reflection, this may only have accelerated a process that started with the introduction of Full Economic Costing (fEC). This had just started as I moved into research development, so I don’t really remember what went before it. I do remember two things, though: firstly, that although research technically still represented a loss-making activity (in that it only paid 80% of the full cost) the reality was that the lucrative overhead payments were very welcome indeed. The second thing I remember is that puns about the hilarious acronym grew very stale very quickly.
So…. institutions wanted to encourage grant-getting activities. How did they do this? They created posts like mine. They added grant-getting to the criteria for academic promotions. They started to set expectations. In some places, I think this even took the form of targets – either for individuals or for research groups. One view I heard expressed was along the lines of, well if Dr X has a research time allocation of Y, shouldn’t we expect her to produce Z applications per year? Er…. if Dr X can produce outstanding research proposals at that rate, and that applying for funding is the best use of her time, then sure, why not? But not all researchers are ESRC-able ideas factories, and some of them are probably best advised to spend at least some of their time, er, writing papers. And my nightmare for social science in the UK is that everyone spends their QR-funded research time writing grant applications, rather than doing any actual research.
Did the sector as a whole adopt a scattergun policy of firing off as many applications as possible, believing that the more you fired, the more likely it would be that some would hit the target? Have academics been applying for funding because they think it’s expected for them, and/or they have one eye on promotion? Has the imperative to apply for funding for something come first, and the actual research topic second? Has there been a tendency to treat the process of getting research council funding as a lottery, for which one should simply buy as many tickets as possible? Is all this one of the reasons why we are where we are today, with the ESRC considering demand management measures? How many rhetorical questions can you pose without irritating the hell out of your reader?
I think the answer to these questions (bar the last one) is very probably ‘yes’.
But my view is based on conservations with a relatively small number of colleagues at a relatively small number of institutions. I’d be very interested to hear what others think.
