Category: Application advice

Postdoc Fellowships: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in March 2022 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

Is relocation always advisable for a postdoc fellowship, and what if it’s not possible?

Most postdoctoral fellowship programmes encourage potential applicants to move institutions, though the strength of that steer and the importance placed on researcher mobility varies from scheme to scheme. At the extreme end, in Europe, the Marie Curie Fellowships programme (not exclusively a postdoc scheme) requires international mobility for eligibility.

“Until tomorrow, the whole world is my home…”

In the UK, most schemes have softened their steer over recent years. Where once staying at your current institution required ‘exceptional justification’ or some similar phrasing, there’s now an increasing awareness that researcher mobility doesn’t make sense for everyone and enforcing it has negative ramifications for equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). It’s much harder and more disruptive for researchers with family commitments to move institutions, and harder for those with partners who are tied to a particular location for family or job reasons. There will be other researchers who are already in the best environment for their research, and so any move would be a backward step. It’s now common for application forms to allow space for both (a) personal/EDI reasons why moving institutions is not possible; and (b) intellectual/research reasons for not wanting to move.

However, there is still a fear that whatever the guidance notes may say, the reality is that reviewers still expect researchers to move for a postdoc fellowship. Or that competitive pressures and limited funds may make it harder for non-mobile proposals to be scored high enough to cross the threshold. It’s not obvious that an exceptional researcher with an exceptional project in a mediocre environment (for whatever reason) could be competitive against rivals who were judged exceptional across all three categories (person, project, place). Even if that researcher had very sound EDI-related reasons for not moving. It’s a tricky issue and there’s no obvious solution, other than a lot more money for fellowships.

It’s worth noting in passing that just because a reviewer has said something, doesn’t mean that the panel paid it any heed. A reviewer may think mobility ought to be compulsory, but the panel will ignore them if that’s not the scheme rule.

Well, there are worse earworms to have…

Why move?

Why do funders want researcher mobility? Funders will say that it’s a good thing, but the reasons are rarely fully articulated. I think there are at least four reasons to look to move:

  • It will grow your network. You already have your contacts and collaborators at your current institution, and any from any previous institutions. Moving institution will lead to an introduction to new research groups with different facilities. You can grow your network from one place, but it’s hard to replicate the dramatic network expansion from moving.
  • It will expose you to a different culture and way of working. Even if some things will be better, some worse, it all contributes to intellectual and professional enrichment. If you’ve not moved, it’s easy to think that there are no alternative ways of working when a problem arises.
  • It will allow you to reinvent yourself. If you’re working with researchers who remember you as a PhD student, or even an undergraduate, it’s difficult for colleagues not to continue to see you that way. I know of a few people who’ve been ‘lifers’ at a single institution and experienced a huge rise in their status in the new institution after moving, because their new colleagues have only ever seen them as a dynamic young researcher.
  • It will boost your progression towards independence. Sitting in the same lab with the same people, it’ll be very hard to move out of their shadow. Especially if they’re very senior.

Should I move?

The world’s greatest ever TV theme tune, folks.

Probably yes. Unless you have personal reasons that make moving difficult or impossible, or you’re confident that you’re already in the best place to undertake your research. One factor to consider is how mobile you’ve already been between undergraduate studies and now. The less you’ve moved, the greater the benefits to move now.

Don’t feel disloyal about moving. Good researchers and mentors know that mobility is a good thing for your development, and that your move could potentially strengthen their links with your target institution and boost collaboration. What’s more, your institution is talking to PhDs and postdocs from other institutions about fellowships. This is how things work.

Hopefully you’ll already know people who work at your target institution, and they’ll be able to point you in the right direction. If you don’t, that makes life harder. You could ask colleagues for an introduction and a recommendation, or send your CV and a proposal to the research group you’d like to work with. Copy in a research manager or administrator. They can only say no. Or not reply at all.  But good research groups will be delighted to hear from talented researchers who work in a relevant area who are willing to apply for a fellowship.

It’s important to make contact early. You’re not going to get a warm reception if you contact the institution a few weeks before the deadline. They will want to help you shape and improve your proposal, and there will be costings and approvals to agree. Your current host institution can’t help you apply elsewhere; the responsibility is all with the new host.

What if I can’t—or justifiably don’t want to—move?

A few Google searches might tell you how many successful candidates in the fellowship scheme’s last round moved, and how many stayed where they were. If not, you could ask a friendly neighbourhood research development manager if anyone has looked at this before.

If there are at least some successes, you should attempt to address the non-mobility question throughout the application, not just in the boxes where you’re specifically asked about it. If there’s a presumption in favour of moving, and you’re not moving, you need to show that you’ve got a solid plan to achieve as many of the benefits of mobility as possible.

  • Have you moved already? If so, look for a way to stress this and explain how you’ve benefited. Don’t just rely on reviewers seeing it in your career history (that’s often a section that’s skim-read).
  • Can you be mobile within an institution? If you’re moving to a new research group, or your work bridges your old group and new one, you can present that as both a form of mobility and evidence of your pathway towards independence. On that note, no-one is saying that you’re never allowed to speak to your old mentor/supervisor again. But can you put some (physical, intellectual, organisational) distance between the two of you in the application? Can you foreground the collaborations you’ve built, the talented researchers who’ve worked specifically with you?
  • Make a positive case for your current research environment. If it has the right equipment, resources, facilities, collaborators, say so. Don’t merely make the ‘negative’ case for why mobility is difficult or impossible for you. Reviewers don’t need persuading that you’re telling the truth there. Instead, persuade them that your current research environment is outstanding.
  • Can you visit other institutions as part of your fellowship? The factors that make moving institutions difficult presumably also make extended visits difficult too. But could you spend a month (or longer) at another research group (maybe even internationally) to, for example, learn a new technique or expand a new collaboration? Even micro-visits can be useful.
  • Have a plan to expand your (academic and non-academic) networks. This could be conference attendance (real or virtual), it could be greater visibility on social media or other channels of communication. It could be volunteering to organise your School’s seminar series. These are all ways of ensuring that you get at least some of the network-expanding benefits of changing institution without actually changing institution.

Better research culture: Some thoughts on the role of Research Development Managers

The Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) held their annual conference back in November 2022. I was lucky enough to have a submission for an on-demand webinar accepted on the topic of research culture, and in particular on the role of Research Development Managers.

The talk covers ways in which Research Managers (and those in similar roles) can improve research culture, first through our own policies and practices, and second, through positively influencing others. I also (briefly) discuss writing ‘research culture’ into funding applications, before making some final predictions about what might the future might hold as regards research culture.

The recording – it’s about half an hour or so of your life that you won’t get back. Because that’s how time works.

The recording features me making a mess of trying to describe myself (not having had to do that before), and includes a few brief references to the broader conference. In my presentation, I assume that copies of my slides will be circulated, but I’ve no idea if they ever were, and if you’re watching now, you certainly won’t have them. That being so, here are the key links from the session.

So you’re new to… UK research funding

A very brief tour of the UK research funding landscape.

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in November 2021 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com.

Originally published in two parts, I’ve merged them into one and lightly edited to update and (in the case of EU funding) to try to future-proof!

Paddington (2014)

This article is intended for researchers who have moved to UK academia recently (welcome!) and for UK researchers in the very early stages of their careers. My aim is to give a very brief tour of the UK research funding landscape and help you get to grips with some of the terminology. In part one, I’ll look at government or public funding and say a bit about different funding models for research. In part two I’ll touch on research charities, learned societies, EU funding, and conclude with some general advice on finding research funding opportunities.

The ‘Dual Support’ system for Research and QR Funding

The UK has a dual support system for the public funding of research. The first element is a ‘block grant’—basically a huge chunk of cash—given to UK universities to spend on research as they see fit. The second (which I’ll come to shortly) is support for specific research projects through competitive peer-review processes.

Most of this block grant is Quality-Related (QR) funding, which is allocated to universities on the basis of their research performance as measured through the last Research Excellence Framework (REF). The REF is a huge evaluation exercise that takes place every seven or so years, most recently in 2021. Although we’re well into what would be the new ‘REF cycle’, we don’t yet know what the rules will be for this round, and things could be radically different. Or very similar. At the time of writing, we don’t know.

Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) doesn’t know anything about the REF either

Universities can spend QR funding on pretty much any research purpose. Typically, it’s used to support academic salaries, research infrastructure, and internal ‘seed funding’ (for smaller, early-stage research projects). It’s a vital source of stable, predictable, flexible core funding for research. Its importance shouldn’t be underestimated.

Although everyone approves of QR funding, you’ll struggle to find many people with a good word about the REF. I did have a go at a partial defence once, pointing out some of the inconsistencies in some of the critiques, which is still the case. Although it’s primarily about the distribution of QR funding, the REF is also used within universities to check up on the performance of constituent schools and research groups. Individual researchers’ contributions towards the ‘REF return’ are also often assessed.

While the REF has many detractors, there is little agreement about what might take its place. The REF deserves its own article, but as yet another review is underway at the time of writing, there’s no point in writing it.

Competitive funding for projects – UKRI

A bus heading for Swindon
UKRI is based in fashionable Swindon, and its HQ has a secret entrance to the railway station.

Competitive funding awarded for specific projects or programmes of work are the second arm of the ‘dual funding’ system. Most publicly funded competitions for academic research grants in the UK are run via an organisation called UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) which is made up of nine funding bodies: seven research councils, a body called Innovate UK which is involved with R&D in commercial contexts, and another called Research England which, among other activities, helps develop and implement the REF.

Of those nine constituent bodies, the research councils are probably the most important for academic researchers to learn about and understand.

The research councils are:

  • Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
  • Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
  • Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
  • Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
  • Medical Research Council (MRC)
  • Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
    • Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)

As you can tell, each of the seven councils has a disciplinary remit that it carries in its name, except for the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which supports research in astronomy and space-related science. It’s also worth mentioning that academic researchers might be involved in grant bids to Innovate UK, but these projects will need to be industry-led or have strong industrial partnerships.

Until 2018, each council was a largely separate identity with a small coordinating/umbrella body called Research Councils UK. Partially in order to encourage interdisciplinary research, UKRI was created with a remit for more active stewardship and coordination.

Each council runs its own funding calls for specific projects, usually a mixture of directed calls on specific issues and responsive mode funding which is open to any discipline within their remit. Each council will have a more-or-less predictable annual cycle of schemes alongside one-off or occasional calls on specific priorities. Some schemes will have specific deadlines, while others will be ‘open call’ – accepting applications at any time. Confusingly, the phrase ‘open call’ is also sometimes used to mean responsive move – open to any topic. The research councils have the most money and should be your first port of call when looking for funding.

Under the long-established Haldane principle, funding decisions on individual research projects are taken by experts, not by government. Although the government has a role in strategic direction and budget allocations, the research councils are autonomous. UKRI is an ‘arms-length body’—that is, government is supposed to keep a safe distance away from its day-to-day functioning, and therefore UKRI’s funding decisions never have to be signed off by a government minister.

In theory, it shouldn’t be possible for proposals to fall between different research councils with neither willing to take ownership. Remit checks are available, and you should take advantage of this if your work could interest two or more Councils or if you are unsure where it fits. Frequently different research councils will collaborate on grant calls with a specific interdisciplinary purpose.

Funders Future, Funders Past

You might hear about the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), which I’ve not included in the council list on the grounds that it doesn’t exist yet, and if/when it does exist, it’s likely to be independent of UKRI. which now does exist and is indeed independent of UKRI. The ambition for Aria is to be a UK equivalent of Darpa in the US, funding “high risk, high reward” research. It’ll do this by appointing academic programme directors to run particular themed funding calls. While those working in universities welcome more research funding, opinion is divided about the merits and demerits of proposed governance arrangements and whether Aria really needs to be a separate organisation.

Speaking of things that don’t exist, you might also hear about the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). This was programme of applied research to support international development, funded from the UK’s international aid budget. But government cuts to the budget brought the scheme to a juddering halt, leading to the curtailment or cancellation of key research projects in some of the world’s poorest countries. Government reneging on funding commitments is widely regarded by researchers as a national disgrace. Even if GCRF returns, trust has been shattered.

Funding Models

UKRI funding is highly prized by UK universities because it pays Full Economic Costs (fEC). I’ve written a separate article detailing how fEC works, but all you need to know for now is that it’s the most attractive financial deal for research because, as the name implies, it means that all the costs of undertaking the research are considered. It’s important to note that a successful grant application will not directly affect your personal salary, though bringing in research funding will strengthen any case for promotion.

Other funders such as charities tend not to pay overheads (contributions towards the costs of running a university) or salary costs for investigators, funding only the directly incurred costs of the research. Fortunately, the government makes an award worth approximately 19% of award value for eligible charity funding through a separate budget line of QR funding.

Even with QR funding and fEC overheads, funding for university research doesn’t come near to covering its share of the costs. In practice, university research is subsidised from other sources, such as teaching income (especially overseas students) and conference and other commercial income.

It’s also worth drawing a distinction between two different categories of research funding – project grants and fellowships. Many funders offer both. Projects are about a particular programme of work, often with multiple co-investigators. Fellowships are about the research too, but they’re also more focused on the individual researcher. At earlier career stages they focus on the personal and professional development of the fellow as well as producing the research findings. At mid and later career stages, they can be about a range of projects or activities carried out by the fellow. Fellowships may involve mentors and collaborators, but usually not co-investigators.

In part two, I’ll touch on NIHR, research charities, learned societies, EU funding, and conclude with some general advice on finding research funding.

European Funding – Horizon Europe

Although the UK has left the European Union, the UK and the EU have agreed that the UK will continue to participate in the EU’s research funding schemes as an ‘Associated Country’. There are already several Associated Country participants including Norway, Turkey, and Switzerland. At the time of writing, the details have yet to be finalised. The UK government has set aside a budget which will fund UK participation in Horizon Europe schemes, including the European Research Council (for frontier research) and Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (researcher training and development).

Whatever I write here risks being out of date by the time I press ‘publish’, but at the moment it looks like the UK is back on track to rejoin Horizon Europe after progress was finally made on the Northern Ireland protocol. There are still complex negotiations to take place about funding shares, but prospects are looking much brighter than before, where some nebulous ‘Plan B’ alternative was being discussed.

In the weeks and months after Brexit, there were fears that Brexit might have a ‘chilling effect’. While remaining technically eligible, the initial concern was that applications led from the UK or involving the UK would be reviewed less favourably. However, there’s been no evidence of this and in fact the UK continued to vie with Germany as host of most prestigious ERC grants in the final calls under Horizon 2020 at a time when Brexit was in full flow, with the UK’s success rates improving in this competition.

However, there may yet be an effect: if UK-based researchers stop applying for funding, there is a risk that it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if the politics have changed, geography hasn’t. The UK is still a major research powerhouse and our European colleagues still want to work with us.

Major Charitable Trusts

The ‘trusts’ are sometimes regarded as quasi-research councils such is the amount of money they have to spend. Both Trusts are funded by investment income – for Leverhulme, a large shareholding in Unilever, and for Wellcome from a portfolio purchased with the proceeds of the sale of Wellcome PLC to what is now GlaxoSmithKline. Both run their own schemes and partner with other funders.

The Leverhulme Trust funds research in any academic discipline apart from medical research and are a particularly important funder for humanities and social sciences.  The Trust offers a suite of standard schemes including project grants and Fellowships at various career stages, which run on an annual basis. They are particularly interested in fundamental/basic/blue skies research and interdisciplinary research. If your project falls between two or more disciplinary stools, is a passion project, is heterodox, and high-risk high-reward, the Leverhulme Trust is well worth a look. Leverhulme also runs larger strategic schemes every few years to which each university can only submit a single application,

The Wellcome Trust funds research into health and wellbeing, including humanities and social science research. They fund work into fundamental biological processes; complexities of human health and disease; and tools, technologies and techniques to benefit health research. They don’t fund translational research or developing/testing/implementing treatments or interventions. With their new strategy, Wellcome have moved to funding longer and more expensive Fellowships and Projects, which has in turn raised their expectations for successful projects.

Wellcome are also partners in a separate, US-based organisation called Wellcome Leap, which (a little like ARIA) draws inspiration from DARPA and funds use-inspired research in the field of human health. They issue complex calls with hyper-short deadlines and turnaround times, usually setting out a programme to be achieved and inviting expressions of interest to participate and contribute towards specific programme goals.

Learned Societies and Academies

These are scholarly societies with royal charters and charitable status which offer research funding, either from private investments, donations, or government funding. The Royal Society funds natural sciences, the British Academy funds humanities and social sciences. The Royal Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Medical Sciences have remits that are more easily guessable.

While they don’t have much money compared to UKRI, they’re often good for Fellowships and for funding for smaller projects which may fall below the minimum funding floor of the relevant research council.

National Institute of Health Research (NIHR)

The NIHR spends public money on research for the benefit of the UK National Health Service (NHS), public health, and social care. More applied and translational than both the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, the NIHR has a wide range of programmes including Health Services and Delivery; Health Technology Assessment; Research for Patient Benefit; and Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation.

Other charities

Most charities that fund research are medical charities, including Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, and Versus Arthritis. But there are a lot of smaller charities too, and it’s a complex picture. A good starting point is the membership list of the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC). They’re an umbrella body that supports member charities, and require certain standards of peer review, transparency in decision making etc of their members.

Finding Funding

If your institution subscribes to Research Professional, you should set up an email funding alert based on your interests. There are a lot of niche/discipline specific funders that I’ve not mentioned here, and this is an excellent way of finding them. You should also sign up to newsletters from key funders in your discipline area, and/or follow them on Twitter.

You should also talk to your local Research Development Manager and to your new colleagues. You’re not alone in your quest for research funding – they’ll have a lot of experience and could save you a lot of time in finding the best funder and scheme for your ideas.

In the UK, as elsewhere, success rates for grant applications tend to be low. They obviously vary, but generally 25% is regarded as pretty good. There are a lot more good ideas than there is funding available. Putting together a competitive grant application is a major undertaking, so it’s important to consider all of the available options to find the most appropriate funder and scheme. It’s tempting to pounce on the first scheme you see. Don’t. Take your time and get advice to find the right one for you.

Research Grant Application Success rates: An optimist writes….

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in October 2019 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

Success rates for many research funding calls may be low, but a quality, competitive application’s chances of success will be much higher. Adam Golberg tries to look on the bright side of life…

Dark Elf Dice, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

When analysing a funding call and deciding whether to apply, it’s always worth finding out the success rate from previous rounds. Some funders are better than others in terms of publicising success rates. Some won’t share them at all, others will hide them away in annual reports, others will publish a lot of details and data, but on relatively hard to find pages on their website. Or they’ll conflate outline and full application stage success rates. If you can’t find success rates easily, ask your friendly neighbourhood research development professional.

One-off or new calls might specify a total budget or expected number of projects to be funded, but obviously won’t have success rates. Changes to funding schemes can make comparisons with previous years less useful, and with multiple stage schemes (outline, full, and perhaps an interview), it’s probably the success rate at each stage that’s most useful to know. Where calls don’t have success rates – and often even when they do – there will usually be details of approximately many awards will be made, or what kind of budget is available for this call.

These success rates and numbers of projects likely to be funded are likely to be depressing – success rates in single digits, in the most extreme cases. But don’t get discouraged too quickly.

Overall scheme success rate vs. competitive application success rate.  

I’d argue that it’s worth thinking in terms of two different success rates. The first is the statistical success rate – total number of awards divided by the total number of applications. I’d argue that there’s a second success rate – the number of awards divided by the number of fundable applications.

What makes an application ‘fundable’?

  • Eligibility: not eligible = automatically unsuccessful.
  • Significance and competitiveness – not merely of relevance to the remit of the call. It must have the clear potential to make a significant contribution to the goals and objectives of the call at the scale expected.
  • Feasibility – in terms of methods, access to data, power calculations, management plan, relations with partners, budgets/resources. Can this be done as proposed?
  • Consistency – research questions don’t mutate or appear and disappear, different sections of the application reinforce rather than contradict each other
  • Clarity – if your application is unclear, you risk referees choosing the least sympathetic reading of any sections that are ambiguous or under-specified. Worse, they might conclude that you haven’t thought it through. Your proposal should have been through multiple drafts and checked repeatedly.

If your application ticks all of these boxes, you probably have a competitive application, and ‘your’ likely success rate could well be double the overall success rate. The overall success rate includes rushed or undercooked applications; the crowbarred-to-fit-the-remit; the ineligible; the incomprehensible; the only-incremental-progress; the only-submitted-to-appease-the-Head-of-School. The fundamentally misconceived; the lacking in novelty; the missing key elements of the literature.

Two reasons not to get too excited – the first is that even double the standard success rate means the odds are very much against you for the majority of funding calls. The second is that most applicants think that their application ticks all the boxes, and won’t number among the unfundable driving down the overall success rate. Probably a few people are knowingly risking a long shot for better reasons or for worse, but most ought to be confident in their proposal.

So how do you tell if you have the potential to submit a competitive, fundable application? Well, the fact that you’re thinking of research funding as a competition is a good start. Probably the best way is to get external input – from your Research Development Manager  (or equivalent) and from senior academic colleagues – at the earliest possible stage. It’s impossible to read a funding call without seeing it through the tinted lenses of your own research ideas and your own expectations. Then you need to take a realistic view about your starting point in terms of the development of the ideas and the team, what the application form requires, the likely success rate for quality applications, the time and energy you and your team have available, and what else you might have done with that time.

One off calls – find the size of prize

One bit of advice I used to give was to see how many projects or fellowships are likely to be funded, and then come to a view about whether your proposal is likely to be competitive in terms of significance.  If there are twenty early career fellowships available, are you likely to be among the twenty strongest applicants in terms of track record and quality and significance of your proposal?

However, I now think the question to ask is subtly different. Is your application likely to be among the twenty strongest who will actually apply, rather than among those who might conceivably apply? There will always be a proportion of potentially strong rivals who don’t apply for whatever reason – they don’t have the time; they don’t have the energy; it’s the wrong stage in the research cycle; they don’t know about the call; or they have other irons in the fire.

Another reason why I no longer pose the question so bluntly is in response to an outstanding early career researcher pointing out to me that it might encourage the wrong people and discourage the right people. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the tendency of the skilled in any particular task to underestimate their own skill and overestimate the skill of others, and while those lacking in skill overestimate their own abilities and find it harder to recognise genuine skill among others. So those who aren’t outstanding candidates are more likely to wrongly believe they are, while those who might are more likely to doubt themselves.

Reasons to be cheerful, part III

Somebody has to win. Individuals and teams are winning those grants. Yes, there is an element of luck involved – which referees are selected, who is on the panel, who speaks up for/against your proposal, what rival bids propose and whether that complements or conflicts. But there’s little you can do about any of that. Your job is to make sure, when deciding to apply – that you can produce a competitive application by the deadline. An eligible, feasible application offering a significant contribution, speaking loudly and clearly to the remit, and written up with clarity and consistency. An application that has every chance of clearing every hurdle and still being in contention on the final straight. Manage that, and you can expect ‘your’ success rate to be significantly better than the scheme average.

Reviewing Internal Peer Review of Grant Applications, Part 2: How to make it work better

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in April 2019 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

We can leap higher with assistance than we can on our own. Picture: Darren England (AAP) via ABC News.

Most universities have internal peer review processes for grant applications. In part one I discussed the different purposes of internal peer review and how they can cause confusion. I also wrote about how to ensure that we present internal peer review as helpful and supportive rather than a hurdle to be overcome. In this second and final part, I’m going to look at how we might do internal peer review of grant applications better.

Who do we ask to review?

The ideal reviewer is a senior academic with a track record of success with major research funding applications and some insight into the subject area. Even at research-intensive institutions, there is a limited supply and their time is valuable. Especially for reviewers in development-related topics because of the volume of Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) bids. [Alas, this example from 2019 has dated poorly.] Our instinct is to ask senior Profs, but I wonder if a closer review by someone less senior could be more useful. We should think beyond the usual suspects, as reviewing can be a developmental exercise. My experience has been that researchers who are rarely asked to review often throw themselves into the task with a lot more enthusiasm. They’re often delighted to be asked, and keen to do a good job.

Do we make internal peer review anonymous?

This is tricky. In my view – ideally – no. Being able to put feedback in the context of the reviewer’s background can be very valuable. I also think that people should be willing to stand behind their comments.

However, because internal peer review can have a filtering role, perhaps the protection of anonymity is required for reviewers to be willing to say that proposals shouldn’t go forward. Or perhaps even to be willing to criticise colleagues’ work at all. However, I would expect that the rationale for soft filtering out an application should be one that most applicants would accept and understand. For a hard filter – when only x number of applications can go forward from the institution – there would usually be a committee decision bound by collective responsibility. I’m not aware of any research or internal survey work done on internal peer reviewers and their attitudes to anonymization, and I’d be interested to see if anyone has looked at this.

How do we ask reviewers to review?

It’s not obvious how to review a grant application. Those without much experience may be reluctant to trust their instincts or judgement because “it’s not really my area”. A small number go the other way and go power crazy at the chance to sit in judgement – judging the proposal from their own personal, partisan perspective and completely write off entire academic disciplines and sub-disciplines.

One option is to ask reviewers to use the same form that the funder in question gives to referees or panel members. It’s a great idea in principle, but academics typically have a loathe-hate relationship with forms. But there are some specific questions we could ask reviewers in a structured way, or use as prompts. Fewer questions will get better answers.

What isn’t clear? What’s confusing or ambiguous?
What are the potential weaknesses?
What’s missing?
How could the application be improved?

If I were to ask a single question, it would be the pre-mortem.

If I could see into the future and tell you now that this application is not going to be funded, what will be the main reason?

This question helps home in on key weaknesses – it might be fit-to-call, it might be unclear methodology; it might be weak impact pathways; it might be the composition of the research team. It’s a good question for applicants to ask themselves.

How do we feed back?

It’s not enough for feedback to be correct, it must be presented in a way that maximises the chances that the PI will listen.

Ideally, I’d like a face-to-face meeting involving the internal reviewers, the Research Development Manager, the PI and possibly the co-investigators. The meeting would be a discussion of a full draft in which reviewers can offer their views and advice and the PI can respond, and ask questions about their impressions of the proposal. I like face-to-face meetings because of the feedback multiplier effect – one reviewer makes an observation, which triggers another in the second reviewer. A PI response to a particular point triggers a further observation or suggestion. If approached in the right spirit (and if well-chaired) this should be a constructive and supportive meeting aimed at maximising the applicant’s chances of success. It must not be a Dragon’s Den style ordeal.

In reality, with packed diaries and short notice calls, it’s going to be difficult to arrange such meetings. So we often have to default to email, which needs a lot of care, as nuance of tone and meaning can be lost. I would advise that feedback is sent through an intermediary – another task for your friendly neighbourhood research development manager – who can think about how to pass it on. Whether to forward it verbatim, add context or comments, or smooth off some abrasive edges. I’ve had a reviewer email me to say that she’s really busy and could I repackage her comments for forwarding? Happy to.

A good approach is to depersonalise the applicant – address the feedback to the draft application, not its authors. (“The current draft could be clearer on….” versus “You could be clearer on…”). But I think depersonalising the reviewers and their comments is a mistake – impersonal, formal language can come over as officious, high handed, and passive aggressive. It will make applicants less likely to engage, even if the advice is solid. Using (even rhetorical) questions rather than blunt statements invites engagement and reflection, rather than passing final judgement.

Which would you respond to best?

The panel’s view is that your summary section is poor and is an introduction to the topic, not a proper summary of your whole project. You should rewrite before submitting.

Or….

Could the summary be strengthened? We thought the draft version read more like an introduction to the topic, and we think reviewers are looking for a summary of the complete proposal in a nutshell. Is there time to revisit this section so it better summarises the project as a whole?

Institutions invest time and money in having arrangements that provide prospective PIs with detailed feedback from senior academic colleagues to improve their chances of success. But it’s all for nothing if the resulting advice is ineffective because of the way the feedback is communicated, or the way the whole process is presented or perceived by researchers.

Reviewing Internal Review of Grant Applications (part 1): Helping or Hoop-jumping?

“The review panel is concerned that your methodology is under-specified”
(WF Yeames, ‘When did you last see your father?‘)

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in April 2019 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

Most universities have internal peer review processes for research grant applications. In the first of two articles about internal peer review, I wonder whether what ought to be valuable support can be perceived as an obstacle. Part two looks at how we might run peer review more effectively.

Why do we have internal peer review?

Internal peer review of research grant applications has two distinct functions which can easily become blurred. I think this can cause misunderstandings.

The first function is as filter – to select which applications go forward and which do not. This has two variants. A ‘hard filter’ for a scheme or funder with formal limits on the number of applications that one institution can submit. Or a ‘soft filter’ where there are no formal limits on application numbers, but there’s a steer from the funder to submit only the most competitive applications. Another motivation for a soft filter is to save academic time by slowing, stopping, or redirecting uncompetitive applications.

The second function is to improve the quality of the application. The goal is to produce some actionable suggestions for improvements to increase the chance of success. In a previous article I explained how research development staff can bring a fresh perspective. Comments from a senior academic of comparable standing to the expert reviewers or funding panel members can be similarly helpful, but with the added benefit of academic expertise.

Both functions of peer review – of filtering and improving – are often rolled together into one process. Perhaps this causes confusion both for reviewers and the reviewed. I wonder if we over-emphasise the role of the filter at the expense of the improvement? Does fear of the filter reduce the efficacy of the suggestions for improvements?

Perceptions of internal peer review

When discussing internal peer review with academic colleagues, I’ve seen wildly different reactions. Some are very enthusiastic and are hungry for comments and feedback. Others are a bit more…. Gollum and don’t want anyone to gaze upon their precious. Most are somewhere in the middle… welcoming of genuinely useful comments and insights, but wary about being forced to make changes against their better judgement or being prevented from applying at all.

There’s no denying that ‘filter’ role exists and it would be mistake to do so. I reassure academics that in my experience it’s very rare for a bid to be soft-filtered out because of internal reviewer’s comments and for the applicant to disagree with the rationale. Usually the reviewer has spotted something that the applicant missed, either related to the call, the application or underpinning idea. Perhaps it needs another co-I, or needs stronger stakeholder engagement, needs to engage with a particular body of literature, or just needs a lot more time to develop. Or the issue is the fit to funder or call.

Research development staff send out details of calls with internal timetables and internal deadlines for the various review stages. But are potential applicants seeing peer review (and associated deadlines) as a developmental process put in place to support them and to help them succeed? Or do they see peer review as a barrier to be overcome (or even evaded), placed in their path by over-officious Heads of Research and research managers that seek to micromanage, police and restrict?

I sometimes worry that in our desire to set out processes to try to prevent and pre-empt disruptive last-minute applications and set out an orderly and timely process, we end up sending the wrong message about peer review and about the broader support available. If we’re dictating terms and timetables for peer review, do we make it look as if grant applicants must fit around reviewer (and research support) requirements and timescales? And is that the right way around?

To be clear, I’m certainly not arguing against having a structured process with indicative milestones with some level of enforcement. Unplanned last minute applications are disruptive and stressful, forcing people to drop everything to provide support with no notice. Worst of all, the applications that result usually aren’t very good and rushed applications are seldom competitive. We absolutely should try to save people from this kind of folly.

And… of course, we need to allow time for senior (and therefore busy) academics to undertake internal peer review. I suspect that most institutions rely on a relatively small pool of reviewers who are asked to read and comment on multiple applications per year, and that few get any formal workload allocation. While we should certainly give applicants plenty of time to write their applications, we need to treat our reviewers with consideration and value their time.

Positive about internal peer review

I’m not arguing that we disguise or minimise the ‘filter’ element of internal peer review in favour of an unqualified upbeat presentation of internal peer review being entirely about improving the quality of the application. But perhaps we could look at ways to present internal peer review in a more positive, supportive, developmental – and less officious – light.

The most important part of peer review positivity – and the subject of the second part of this series – is in how internal peer review happens in practice: who reviews, how and when; and how and in what spirit reviewer comments are communicated to applicants. If internal peer review as a process helps strengthen applications, word will get round and support and buy-in will grow – one positive experience at a time.

But even before that stage, I think it’s worth thinking about how we communicate our internal peer review processes and timetables. Could we be more positive in our framing and communication? Could we present internal peer review more as a helping hand to climb higher, and less as a hurdle to overcome?

An applicant’s guide to Full Economic Costing

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in July 2019 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

Image courtesy of Max Pixel CC0 Public Domain License

You’re applying for UK research council funding and suddenly you’re confronted with massive overhead costs. Adam Golberg tries to explain what you need to know.

Trying to explain Full Economic Costing is not straightforward. For current purposes, I’ll be assuming that you’re an academic applying for UK Research Council funding; that you want to know enough to understand your budget; and that you don’t really want to know much more than that.

If you do already know a lot about costing or research finances, be warned – this article contains simplifications, generalisations, and omissions, and you may not like it.

What are Full Economic Costs, and why are they taking up so much of my budget?

Full Economic Costs (fEC) are paid as part of UK Research and Innovation grants to cover a fair share of the wider costs of running the university – the infrastructure that supports your research. There are a few different cost categories, but you don’t need to worry about the distinctions.

Every UK university calculates its own overhead rates using a common methodology. I’m not going to try to explain how this works, because (a) I don’t know; and (b) you don’t need to know. Most other research funders (charities, EU funders, industry) do not pay fEC for most of their schemes. However, qualifying peer-reviewed charity funding does attract a hidden overhead of around 19% through QR funding (the same source as REF funding). But it’s so well hidden that a lot of people don’t know about it. And that’s not important right now.

How does fEC work?

In effect, this methodology produces a flat daily overhead rate to be charged relative to academic time on your project. This rate is the same for the time of the most senior professor and the earliest of early career researchers.

One effect of this is to make postdoc researchers seem proportionally more expensive. Senior academics are more expensive because of higher employment costs (salary etc), but the overheads generated by both will be the same. Don’t be surprised if the overheads generated by a full time researcher are greater than her employment costs.

All fEC costs are calculated at today’s rates. Inflation and increments will be added later to the final award value.

Do we have to charge fEC overheads?

Yes. This is a methodology that all universities use to make sure that research is funded properly, and there are good arguments for not undercutting each other. Rest assured that everyone – including your competitors– are playing by the same rules and end up with broadly comparable rates. Reviewers are not going to be shocked by your overhead costs compared to rival bids. Your university is not shooting itself (or you) in the foot.

There are fairness reasons not to waive overheads. The point of Research Councils is to fund the best individual research proposals regardless of the university they come from, while the REF (through QR) funds for broad, sustained research excellence based on historical performance. If we start waiving overheads, wealthier universities will have an unfair advantage as they can waive while others drown.

Further, the budget allocations set by funders are decided with fEC overheads in mind. They’re expecting overhead costs. If your project is too expensive for the call, the problem is with your proposal, not with overheads. Either it contains activities that shouldn’t be there, or there’s a problem with the scope and scale of what you propose.

However, there are (major) funding calls where “evidence of institutional commitment” is expected. This could include a waiver of some overheads, but more likely it will be contributions in kind – some free academic staff time, a PhD studentship, new facilities, a separate funding stream for related work. Different universities have different policies on co-funding and it probably won’t hurt to ask. But ask early (because approval is likely to be complex) and have an idea of what you want.

What’s this 80% business?

This is where things get unnecessarily complicated. Costs are calculated at 100% fEC but paid by the research councils at 80%. This leaves the remaining 20% of costs to be covered by the university. Fortunately, there’s enough money from overheads to cover the missing 20% of direct costs. However, if you have a lot of non-pay costs and relatively little academic staff time, check with your costings team that the project is still affordable.

Why 80%? In around 2005 it was deemed ‘affordable’ – a compromise figure intended to make a significant contribution to university costs but without breaking the bank. Again, you don’t need to worry about any of this.

Can I game the fEC system, and if so, how?

Academic time is what drives overheads, so reducing academic time reduces overheads. One way to do this is to think about whether you really need as much researcher time on the project. If you really need to save money, could contracts finish earlier or start later in the project?

Note that non-academic time (project administrators, managers, technicians) does not attract overheads, and so are good value for money under this system. If some of the tasks you’d like your research associate to do are project management/administration tasks, your budget will go further if you cost in administrative time instead.

However, if your final application has unrealistically low amounts of academic time and/or costs in administrators to do researcher roles, the panel will conclude that either (a) you don’t understand the resource implications of your own proposal; or (b) a lack of resources means the project risks being unable to achieve its stated aims. Either way, it won’t be funded. Funding panels are especially alert for ‘salami projects’ which include lots of individual co-investigators for thin slivers of time in which the programme of research cannot possibly be completed. Or for undercooked projects which put too much of a burden on not enough postdoc researcher time. As mentioned earlier, if the project is too big for the call budget, the problem is with your project.

The best way to game fEC it is not to worry about it. If you have support with your research costings, you’ll be working with someone who can cost your application and advise you on where and how it can be tweaked and what costs are eligible. That’s their job – leave it to them, trust what they tell you, and use the time saved to write the rest of the application.

Thanks to Nathaniel Golden (Nottingham Trent) and Jonathan Hollands (University of Nottingham) for invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article. Any errors that remain are my own.

Summary-time, and the writing ain’t easy…

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in March 2019 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

“…. the words”.

All funding schemes have a summary section as an essential part of the application form. On the UK research councils’ JeS form, the instruction is to “[d]escribe the proposed research in simple terms in a way that could be publicised to a general audience”.

But the summary is not just about publicising your research. The summary also:

  • primes your reader’s expectations and understanding of your project
  • helps the funder to identify suitable experts to review your application
  • gives the reviewer a clear, straightforward, and complete overview of your project
  • helps your nominated funding panel introducer to summarise your application for the rest of the decision-making panel
  • acts as a prompt for the other panel members to recall your application, which they may have only skim-read
  • can be used once your project is successful, for a variety of purposes including ethics review; participant recruitment; impact work.
  • will appeal to non-academic panel members, especially for Leverhulme Trust applications.

How to make a mess of a summary

There are three main ways to make a mess of your summary.

1. Concentrating on the context – writing an introduction, not a summary.

I’ve written before about using too much background or introductory material (what I describe as ‘the Star Wars error’) but it’s a particular problem for a summary. The reader needs some context and background, but if it’s more than a sentence or two, it’s probably too much. If you don’t reach the “this research will” tipping point by a third of the way through (or worse, even later), there’s too much background.

2. Writing to avoid spoilers – writing a blurb not a precis

I really admire film editors who produce movie trailers: they capture the essence of the film while minimising spoilers. However while a film trailer for The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, or The Crying Game should omit certain key elements, a project summary needs to include all of them. An unexpected fifth-act twist is great for film fans, but not for reviewers. Their reaction to your dramatic twist of adding a hitherto unheralded extra research question or work package is more likely to earn you bafflement and a poor review than an Oscar.

3. Ignoring Plain English

The National Institute for Health Research’s Research for Patient Benefit form asks for a “Plain English summary of research”. As a former regional panel member, I have read many applications and some great examples of Plain English summaries of very complex projects. I have read applications from teams that have not tried at all, and from those whose commitment to Plain English lasts the first three paragraphs, before they lapse back.

Writing in Plain English is hard. It involves finding a way to forget how you usually communicate to colleagues, and putting yourself in the situation of someone who knows a fraction of what you do. Without dumbing down or patronising. If it wasn’t hard to write in Plain English, we wouldn’t need the expert shorthand of specialist language, which is usually created to simplify complicated concepts to facilitate clear and concise communication among colleagues.

Very few people can write their own Plain English summary. It’s something you probably need help with, and your friendly neighbourhood research development officer might be well placed to do this – and might even draft it for you.

Incidentally, with NIHR schemes, beware not only of using specialist language, but also using higher-reading-level vocabulary and expressions when more simple ones will do. There’s no need for a superabundance of polysyllabic terminonlogy. The Levehulme Trust offers some useful guidance on writing for the lay ‘lay reader’.

When to write it

Should you write the summary when you start the application, or when you’ve finished it? Ideally both.

You should sketch out your summary when you start writing – if you can’t produce a bullet point summary of your project you’re probably not ready to write it up as an application. Save plenty of time at the very end to rework it in the light of your completed project. Above all, get as much outside input on your summary as you can. It is the most important part of the application, and well worth your time and trouble.

How can we help researchers with grant applications? The contribution of Research Development professionals

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in February 2019 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

Duck/Rabbit, Joseph Jastrow (1899).

You are the academic expert, in the process of applying for funding to make a major advance in your field. I am not. I am a Research Development Manager – perhaps I have a PhD or MPhil in a cognate or entirely different field, or nothing postgraduate at all. How can I possibly help you?

The answer lies in this difference of experience and perspective. Sure, we may look at the same things, but different levels of knowledge,understanding – as well as different background assumptions –  mean we find very different meanings in them. We all look at the world through lenses tinted by our own experiences and expectations, and if we didn’t, we couldn’t make sense of it.

Interpreting funding calls

When academics look at funding calls, they notice and emphasise the elements of the call that suit their agenda and often downplay or fail to notice other elements. Early in my career I was baffled as to why a very senior professor thought that a funding call was appropriate for a project. He’s smarter than me, more experienced…so obviously I assumed I’d got it wrong. I went back to the call expecting to find my mistake and find that his interpretation was correct. But no…my instinct was right.

Since then I’ve regularly had these conversations and pointed out that an idea would need crowbarring to death to fit a particular call, and even then would be uncompetitive. I’ve had to point out basic eligibility problems that have escaped the finely-honed research skills of frightening bright people.

When research development professionals like me look at a funding call, we see it through tinted glasses too, but these are tinted by comparable calls that we’ve seen before. We see what has unusual or disproportionate emphasis or lack of emphasis, or even the significance of what’s missing. We know what we’re looking for and whereabouts in the call we expect to see it.  Our reading of calls is enhanced by a deep knowledge of the funder and its priorities, and what might be the motivation or source of funding behind a particular call.

Of course, some academics have an excellent understanding of particular funders. Especially if they’ve received funding from them, or served on a panel or as a referee, or been invited to a scoping workshop to inform the design and remit of a funding call.

But if you’re not in that position, the chances are that your friendly neighbourhood research development professional can advise you on how to interpret any given funder or scheme, or put you in touch with someone who can.

We can help you identify the most appropriate scheme and call for what you want to do, and just as importantly, prevent you from wasting your time on bids that are a poor fit. Often the best thing I do on any given day is talking someone out of spending weeks writing an application that never had any realistic chance of success.

Reading draft applications

You must have internal expert peer review and encourage your academic colleagues to be brave enough to criticise your ideas and point out weaknesses in their iteration. Don’t be Gollum.

Research Development professionals can’t usually offer expert review, but a form of lay review can be just as useful. We may not be experts in your area, but we’ve seen lots and lots of grant applications, good and bad. We have a sense of what works. We know when the balance is wrong. We know when we don’t understand sections that we think we should be able to understand, such as the lay summary. We notice when the significance or unique contribution is not clearly spelled out. We know when the methods are asserted, rather than defended. We know when sections are vague or undercooked, or fudged. Or inconsistent. When research questions appear, disappear, or mutate during the course of an application.

When I meet with academics and they explain their project, I often find there’s a mismatch between what I understood from reading a draft proposal and  what they actually meant. It’s very common for only 75%-90% of an idea to be on the page. The rest will be in the mind of the applicant, who will think the missing elements are present in the document because they can’t help but read the draft through the lens of their complete idea.

If your research development colleagues misunderstand or misread your application, it may be because they lack the background, but it’s more likely that what you’ve written isn’t clear enough. There’s a lot to be learned from creative misinterpretation.

None of this is a criticism of academics; it’s true for everyone. We all see our own writing through the prism of what we intend to write, not what we’ve actually written. It’s why this article would be even worse without Research Professional’s editorial team.

A Fantastic ‘Funding Friday’ in Finland

Last month Back in February, I was delighted to be invited to give the keynote talk at the University of Turku’s inaugural Funding Friday event. Before the invitation I didn’t know very much about Finland (other than the joke that in Finland, an extrovert is someone who stares at your shoes) and still less about the Finnish research funding environment. But I presumed (largely, if not entirely correctly) that there are a great many issues in common, and that advice about writing grant applications would be reasonably universal.

When someone takes Finnish stereotypes too seriously
Finnish Nightmares, by Karoliina Korhonen

When I reached the venue I was slightly surprised to see early arrivals each sitting at their own individual one-person desk. For a moment I did wonder if the Finnish stereotype was true to the extent that even sharing a desk was regarded as excessively extrovert. However, there was a more obvious explanation – it was exam season and the room doubled as an exam hall.

The Star Wars Error in Grant Writing

I was very impressed with the Funding Friday event. I was surprised to realise that I’d never been to a university-wide event on research funding – rather, we’ve tended to organise on a Faculty or School basis. The structure of the event was a brief introduction, my presentation (Applying for Research Funding: Preparations, Proposals, and Post-Mortems) followed by a panel discussion with five UTU academics who served on funding panels. Maria guided the panel through a series of questions about their experiences – how they ended up on a funding panel, what they’d learnt, what they looked for in a proposal, and what really annoyed them  – and took questions from the floor. This was a really valuable exercise, and something that I’d like to repeat at Nottingham. I’m always trying to humanise reviewers and panel members in the minds of grant applicants and to help them understand the processes of review and evaluation, and having a range of panel members from across academic disciplines willing to share their experiences was fascinating. Of course, not everyone agreed on everything, but there seemed to be relative uniformity across panels and academic disciplines in terms of what panel members wanted to see, what made their jobs easier, and what irritated them and made things harder.

In the afternoon, we had a series of shorter sessions from UTU’s research funding specialists. Lauri spoke about applying Aristotle’s teachings on rhetoric (ethos, pathos, and logos) to structuring research grant proposals – a really interesting approach that I’d not come across before. What is a grant application if not an attempt to persuade, and what’s rhetoric if not the art of persuasion? Anu talked about funding opportunities relative to career stage, and Johanna discussed the impact agenda, and it was particularly fascinating to hear how that’s viewed in Finland, given its growth and prominence in the UK. From discussions in the room there are clearly worries about the balance between funding for ‘blue skies’ or basic research and for applied research with impact potential. Finally, we heard from Samira, a successful grant winner, about her experiences of applying for funding. It’s great to hear from successful applicants to show that success is possible in spite of dispiriting success rates.

To resubmit, or not to resubmit, that is the question

I’d arrived with the assumption that research – like almost everything else in the Nordic social democracies – would be significantly better funded pro rata than in the UK. (See, for example, the existence of an affordable, reliable railway system with play areas for small children on intercity trains). However, success rates are broadly comparable. One significant difference between the UK and Finland funding landscapes is the prevalence of the UK ‘demand management’ agenda. This limits – or even bans – the re-submission of unsuccessful applications, or imposes individual or institutional sanctions/limits on numbers and timing of future applications. The motivating force behind this is to reduce the burden of peer review and assessment, both on funders and on academic reviewers and panel members. Many UK funders, especially the ESRC, felt that a lot of the applications they were receiving were of poor quality and stood little chance of funding.

Finnish funders take an approach that’s more like the European Research Council or the Marie Curie Fellowship, where resubmissions are not only allowed but often seem to be a part of the process. Apply, be unsuccessful, get some feedback, respond to it, improve the application, and get funded second or a subsequent time round. However, one problem – as our panel of panel members discussed – is that panel membership varies from year to year, and the panel who almost nearly funded your proposal one year is not going to be the same panel who reviews the improved version the following year. For this reason, we probably shouldn’t always expect absolute consistency from panels between years, especially as the application will be up against a different set of rival bids. Also, the feedback may not contain the reasons why an application wasn’t funded nor instructions on how to make it fundable next time. Sometimes panels will point out the flaws in applications, but can be reluctant to say what needs to be said – that no version of this application, however polished, will ever be competitive. I’ve written previously about deciding whether to resubmit or not, although it was written with the UK context in mind.

The room was very much split on whether or not those receiving the lowest marks should be prevented from applying again for a time, or even about a more modest limitation on applying again with a similar project. Of course, what the UK system does is move the burden of peer review back to universities, who are often poorly placed to review their own applications as almost all their expertise will be named on the bid. But I also worry about a completely open resubmission policy if it’s not accompanied by rigorous feedback, making it clear not only how an application can be improved, but on how competitive even the best possible iteration of that idea would be.

One of the themes to emerge from the day was about when to resubmit and when to move on. Funding (and paper, and job) rejection is a fact of academic life, calling for more than a measure of determination, resilience, bouncebackability, (or as they say in Finland) sisu . But carried too far, it ends up turning into stubbornness, especially if the same unsuccessful application is submitted over and over again with little or no changes. I think most people would accept that there is an element of luck in getting research funding – I’ve seen for myself how one negative comment can prompt others, leading to a criticism spiral which sinks an initially well-received application. Sometimes – by chance – there’s one person on the panel who is a particular subject expert and really likes/really hates a particular proposal and swings the discussion in a way that wouldn’t have happened without their presence. But the existence of an element of luck does not mean that research funding is lottery in which all you need do is keep buying your ticket until your number comes up. Luck is involved, but only regarding which competitive applications are funded.

I’ve written a couple of posts before (part one, and part two) about what to do when your grant application is unsuccessful, and they might form the beginnings of a strategy to respond and to decide what to do next. At the very least, I think a thorough review of the application and any feedback offered is in order before making any decisions. I think my sense is that in any system where resubmissions are an accepted feature, and where it’s common for resubmissions to be successful, it would a shame to give up after the first attempt. By the twelfth, though…

Watching your language

I was fascinated to learn that responsibility for training in research grant application writing is shared between UTU’s research development team and their English language unit. National funders tend to give the option of writing in English or in Finnish, though writing in English makes it easier to find international referees and reviewers for grant applications – and indeed one of my Business School colleagues is a regular reviewer.

One issue I’m going to continue to think is about support for researchers writing grant applications in their second or additional language. English language support is an obvious service to offer for a university in a country whose own language is not commonly spoken beyond the borders of immediate neighbours, and particularly in Finland where the language isn’t part of the same Indo-European language group as most of the rest of Europe. But it’s not something we think about much in the UK.

I’d say about half of the researchers I support speak English as a second language, and some of the support I provide can be around proof reading and sense-making – expressing ideas clearly and eliminating errors that obscure meaning or which might irritate the reader. I tend to think that reviewers will understand some minor mistakes or awkward phrasing in English provided that the application does not contain lazy or careless errors. If a reviewer is to take the time reading it, she wants to see that the applicant has taken his time writing it.

I think most universities run courses on academic English, though I suspect most of them are designed for students. Could we do more for academic staff who want to improve their academic English- not just for grant writing, but for teaching and for the purposes of writing journal papers? And could we (and should we) normalise that support as part of professional development? Or do we just assume that immersion in an English-speaking country will be sufficient?

However… I do think that academics writing in their second language have one potential advantage. I’ve written elsewhere about the ‘Superabundance of Polysyllabic Terminology’ (aka too many long words) error in grant writing, to which native English speakers are more prone. Second language academics tend to write more clearly, more simply, and more directly.  Over-complicated language can be confusing and/or annoying for a native English speaker reviewing your work, but there’s a decent chance that reviewers and panel members might speak English as a second language, who will be even more irritated. One piece of advice I once heard for writing EU grant applications was to write as if your application was going to reviewed by someone reading it in the fourth language while waiting to catch their flight. Because it might well be.

It was a real honour to visit Turku, and I’d have loved to have stayed longer. While there’s  a noticeable quietness and a reserve about Finnish people – even compared to the UK – everyone I met couldn’t have been more welcoming and friendly. So, to Soile, Lauri, Anu, Johanna, Jeremy, Samira, the Turku hotel receptionist who told me how to pronounce sisu, everyone else I met, and especially to Maria for organising …. kiittos, everyone.