Category: ESRC

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.

Setting Grant Getting Targets in the Social Sciences

I’m writing this in the final week of my current role as Research Development Manager (Social Sciences) at the University of Nottingham before I move to my role as Research Development Manager (Research Charities) at the University of Nottingham. This may or may not change the focus of this blog, but I won’t abandon the social sciences entirely – not least because I’m stuck with the web address.

Image by Tookapic

I’ve been thinking about strategies and approaches to research funding, and the place and prioritisation of applying for research grants in academic structures. It’s good for institutions to be ambitious in terms of their grant getting activities. However, these ambitions need to be at least on a nodding acquaintance with:
(a) the actual amount of research funding historically available to any given particular discipline; and
(b) the chances of any given unit or school or individual to compete successfully for that funding given the strength of the competition.

To use a football analogy, if I want my team to get promotion, I should moderate my expectations in the light of how many promotion places are available, and how strong the likely competition for those limited spots will be. In both cases, we want to set targets that are challenging, stretching, and ambitious, but which are also realistic and informed by the evidence.

How do we do that? Well, in a social science context, a good place to start is the ESRC success rates, and other disciplines could do worse than take a similar approach with their most relevant funding council. The ESRC produce quite a lot of data and analysis on funding and success rates, and Alex Hulkes of the ESRC Insights team writes semi-regular blog posts. Given the effort put into creating and curating this information, it seems only right that we use it to inform our strategies. This level of transparency is a huge (and very welcome) change from previous practices of very limited information being rather hidden away. Obvious caveats – the ESRC is by no means the only funder in town for the social sciences, but they’re got the deepest pockets and offer the best financial terms. Another (and probably better) way would be to compare HESA research income stats, but let’s stick to the ESRC for now.

The table below shows the running three year total (2015/6- 2017/18) and number of applications for each discipline for all calls, and the total for the period 2011/12 to 2017/8. You can access the data for yourself on the ESRC web page. This data is linked as ‘Application and success rate data (2011-12 to 2017-18)’ and was published in ODS format in May 2018. For ease of reading I’ve hidden the results from individual years.

Lots of caveats here. Unsuccessful outline proposals aren’t included (as no outline application leads directly to funding), but ‘office rejects’ (often for eligibility reasons) are. The ‘core discipline’ of each application is taken into account – secondary disciplines are not. The latest figures here are from 2017-2018 (financial year), so there’s a bit of a lag – in particular, the influence of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) or Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) will not be fully reflected in these figures. I think the ‘all data’ figures may include now-defunct schemes such as the ESRC Seminar Series, though I think Small Grants had largely gone by the start of the period covered by these figures.

Perhaps most importantly, because these are the results for all schemes, they include targeted calls which will rarely open to all disciplines equally. Fortunately, the ESRC also publishes similar figures for their open call (Standard) Research Grants scheme for the same time period. Note that (as far as I can tell) the data above includes the data below, just as the ‘all data’ column (which goes back to 2011/2) also includes the three year total.

This table is important because the Research Grants Scheme is bottom-up, open-call, and open to any application that’s at least 50% social sciences. Any social science researcher could apply to this scheme, whereas directed calls will inevitably appeal only to a subset. These are the chances/success rates for those whose work does not fit squarely into a directed scheme and could arguably be regarded as a more accurate measure of disciplinary success rates. It’s worth noting that a specific call that’s very friendly to a particular discipline is likely to boost the successes but may decrease the disciplinary success rate if it attracts a lot of bids. It’s also possible that major targetted calls that are friendly to a particular disciplin may result in fewer bids to open call.

To be fair, there are a few other regular ESRC schemes that are similarly open and should arguably be included if we wanted to look at the balance of disciplines and what a discipline target might look like. The New Investigator Scheme is open in terms of academic discipline, if not in time-since-PhD, and the Open Research Area call is open in terms of discipline if not in terms of collaborators. The Secondary Data Analysis Initiative is similarly open in terms of discipline, if not in terms of methods. Either way, we don’t have (or I can’t find) data which combines those schemes into a non-directed total.

Nevertheless, caveats and qualifications aside, I think these two tables give us a good sense of the size of prize available for each discipline. There’s approxinately 29 per year (of which 5 open call) for Economics, and 11 per year (of which 2 open call) for Business and Management. Armed with that information and a knowledge of the relative strength of the discipline/school in our own institution, we ought to get a sense of what a realistic target might look like and a sense of how well we’re already doing. Given what we know about our expertise, eminence, and environment, and the figures for funded projects, what ought our share of those projects be?

We could ask a further question about how those successes are distributed between universities and about any correllation between successes and (unofficial) subject league tables from the last REF, calculated on the basis of Grade Point Average or Research power. However, even if that data were available, we’d be looking at small numbers. We do know that the ESRC have done a lot of work on looking at funding distribution and concentration and their key findings are that:

ESRC peer review processes do not concentrate funding to a degree greater than that apparent in the proposals that request the funding.

ROs which apply infrequently appear to have lower success rates than do those which are more active applicants

In other words, most universities typically have comparable succcess rates except that those that apply more often do a little better than average, those who apply rarely do a little worse. This sounds intuitively right – those who apply more are likely more research-active, at least in the social sciences, and therefore more likely to generate stronger applications. But this is at an overall level, not discipline level.

I’d also note that we shouldn’t only measure success by the number of projects we lead. As grants get larger on average, there’s more research income available for co-investigators on bids leds elsewhere. I think a strategy that focuses only on leading bids and being lead institution neglects the opportunties offered by being involved in strong bids led by world class researchers based elsewhere. I’m sure it’s not unusual for co-I research income to exceed PI income for academic units.

I’ve not made any comment about the different success rates for different disciplines. I’ve written about this already for many of the years covered by the full data (though Alex Hulkes has done this far more effectively over the last few years, having the benefit of actual data skills) and I don’t really want to cover old ground again. The same disparities continue much as before. Perhaps GCRF will provide a much-needed boost for Education research (or at least the international aspects) and ISCF for management and business research.

Maybe.

Top application tips for postdoc fellowships in the social sciences

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in June 2018 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

Post-doctoral or early career research fellowships in the social sciences have low success rates and are scarcely less competitive than academic posts. But if you have a strong proposal, at least some publications, realistic expectations and a plan B, applying for one of these schemes can be an opportunity to firm up your research ideas and make connections.

Reality check

If you’re thinking of applying for a postdoc or early career social science fellowship, you should ask yourself the following:

  • Are you likely to be one of the top (say) six or seven applicants in your academic discipline?
  • Does your current track record demonstrate this, or at least trajectory towards it?
  • Is applying for a Fellowship the best use of your time?

There’s a lot of naivety about the number of social science fellowships there are and the competition for them. Perhaps some PhD supervisors paint too rosy a picture, perhaps it is applicant wishful thinking, or perhaps the phrasing of some calls understates the reality of what’s required of a competitive proposal. But the reality is that Postdoc Fellowships in the social sciences are barely less competitive than lectureships. Competitive pressures mean that standards are driven sky high and demand exceeds supply by a huge margin.

The British Academy has a success rate of around 5%, with 45 Fellowships across arts, humanities, and social sciences. The Leverhulme Trust success rate is 14%, with around 100 Fellowships across all the disciplines they support (i.e. nearly all). The ESRC scheme is new – no success rates yet – but it will support 30-35 social science Fellowships. Marie Curie Fellowships are still available, but require relocating to another European country. There are the new UKRI Future Leader Fellowships which will fund 100 per call, but that’s across all subjects, and these are very much ‘future leader’ not ‘postdoc’ calls. Although some institutions have responded to a lack of external funding by establishing internal schemes – such as the Nottingham Research Fellowships – standards and expectations are also very, very high.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t apply – Fellowships do exist, applicants do get them – but you need to take a realistic view of your chances of success and decide about the best use of your time. If you’re writing a Fellowship application, you’re not writing up a paper, or writing a job application.

Top Tips for applications

  • Credible applicants need their own (not their supervisor’s) original, detailed and significant Fellowship project. Doing ‘more of the same’ is unlikely to be competitive – it’s fine to want to mine your PhD for publications and for there to be a connection to the new programme of work, but a Fellowship is really about the next stage.
  • If you don’t have any publications, you have little to make you stand out, and therefore little to no chance. Like all grant applications, this is a contest, not a test. It’s not about being sufficiently promising to be worth funding (most applicants are), it’s about presenting a stronger and more compelling case than your rivals.
  • If you have co-authored publications, make your contribution clear. If you have co-written a paper with your supervisor, make sure reviewers can tell whether (a) it is your work, with supervisory input; or (b) it is your supervisor’s work, for which you provided research assistance.
  • Give serious consideration to moving institution unless (a) you’re already at the best place for what you want to do; or (b) your personal circumstances prevent this. Moving institution doubles your network, may give you a better research environment, and gives you a fresh start where you’re seen as an early career researcher, not as the PhD student you used to be. If you’re already at the best place for your work or you can’t move, make the case. Funders are becoming a bit less dogmatic on this point and more aware that not everyone can relocate, but don’t assume that staying put is the best idea.
  • Don’t neglect training and development plans. Who would you like to meet or work with, what would you like training in, what extra research and impact skills would you like to have? Fellowships are about producing the researcher as well as the research.
  • Success rates are very low. Don’t get your hopes up, and don’t put all your eggs in one basket and neglect other opportunities.
  • Much of the rest of my advice on research grant writing applies to Fellowships too.

Even if you’re ultimately unsuccessful, you can also use the application as a vehicle to support the development of your post-PhD research agenda. By expressing a credible interest in applying for a Fellowship at an institution that’s serious about research, you will get feedback on your research plans from senior academics and potential mentors and from research development staff. It also forces you to put your ideas down on paper in a coherent way. Whether you apply for a Fellowship or not, you’ll need this for the academic job market.

Eight tips for attending a research call information and networking day

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in July 2018 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

‘School of Athens’ by Raphael. Aristotle is willing to join Plato’s project as co-I, but only if his research group gets at least two FT research fellows. Unfortunately, Plato’s proposal turns out to be merely a pale imitation of the perfect (JeS) form and isn’t invited to full application stage.

Many major research funding calls for substantial UKRI investments now include one or more workshops or events. These events typically aim:

(a) to publicise the call and answer questions from potential bidders; and
(b) to facilitate networking and to develop consortia, often including non-academic partners.

There’s an application process to gauge demand and to allocate or ration places (if required) between different disciplines and institutions. These events are distinct from ‘sandpit’ events – which have a more rigorous and competitive application process and where direct research funding may result. They’re also distinct from scoping meetings, which define and shape future calls. Some of the advice below might be applicable for those events, but my experience is limited to the call information day.

I’ve attended one such meeting and I found it very useful in terms of understanding the call and the likely competition for funding. While I’ve attended networking and idea generation events before, this was my first UKRI event, and I’ve come up with a few hints and tips that might help other first time attendees.

  1. Don’t send Research Development staff. People like me are more experienced at identifying similarities/differences in emphasis in calls, but we can only go so far in terms of networking and representing academics. However well briefed, there will come a point at which we can’t answer further questions because we’re not academics. Send an academic if you possibly can.
  2. Hone your pitch. A piece of me dies inside every time I use a phrase like “elevator pitch”, but the you’re going to be introducing yourself, your team, and your ideas many, many times during the day. Prepare a short version and a long version of what you want to say. It doesn’t have to be crafted word-for-word, but prepare the structure of a clear, concise introduction that you can comfortably reel off.
  3. Be clear about what you want and what you’re looking for. If you’re planning on leading a bid, say so. If you’re looking to add your expertise on X to another bid TBC, say so. If you’re not sure yet, say so. I’m not sure what possible advantage could be gained about being coy. You could finesse your starting position by talking of “looking to” or “planning to” lead a bid if you want, but much better to be clear.
  4. Don’t just talk to your friends. Chances are that you’ll have friends/former colleagues at the event who you may not see as often as you’d like, but resist spending too much time in your comfort zone. It’ll limit your opportunities and will make you appear cliquey. Consider arranging to meet before or after the event, or at another time to catch up properly.
  5. Be realistic about what’s achievable. I’m persuadable that these events can and do shape the composition/final teams of some bids, but I wonder whether any collaboration starting from ground level at one of these events has a realistic chance of success.
  6. Do your homework. Most call meetings invite delegates to submit information in advance, usually a brief biog and a statement of research interests. It’s worth taking time to do this well, and having a read of the information submitted by others. Follow up with web searches about potential partners to find out more about their work, follow them on twitter, and find out what they look like if you don’t already know. It’s not stalking if it’s for research collaboration.
  7. Brush up your networking skills. If networking is something you struggle with, have a quick read of some basic networking guides. Best tip I was ever given – regard networking as a process to identify “how can I help these people?” rather than “how can I use these people to my advantage?” and it’s much easier. Also, I find… “I think I follow you on twitter” an effective icebreaker.
  8. Don’t expect any new call info. There will be a presentation and Q&A, but don’t expect major new insights. As not everyone can make these events, funders avoid giving any unfair advantages. Differences in nuance and emphasis can emerge in presentations and through questions, but don’t expect radical additional insights or secret insider knowledge.

If your target call has an event along these lines, you should make every effort to attend. Send your prospective PI if you can, another academic if not, and your research development staff only if you must. Do a bit of homework… be clear about what you want to achieve, prepare your pitch, and identify the people you want to talk to, and you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals.

Applying for research funding – is it worth it? Part II – Costs and Benefits

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight on 9th March 2018 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

My previous post posed a question about whether applying for research funding was worth it or not, and concluded with a list of questions to consider to work out the answer. This follow-up is a list of costs and benefits associated with applying for external research funding, whether successful or unsuccessful. Weirdly, my list appears to contain more costs than benefits for success and more benefits than costs for failure, but perhaps that’s just me being contrary…

If you’re successful:

Benefits….

  • You get to do the research you really want to do
  • In career terms, whether for moving institution or internal promotion, there’s a big tick in the box marked ‘external research funding’.
  • Your status in your institution and within your discipline is likely to rise. Bringing in funding via a competitive external process gives you greater external validation, and that changes perceptions – perhaps it marks you out as a leader in your field, perhaps it marks a shift from career young researcher to fulfilling your evident promise.
  • Success tends to begat success in terms of research funding. Deliver this project and any future application will look more credible for it.

Costs…

  • You’ve got to deliver on what you promised. That means all the areas of fudge or doubt or uncertainty about who-does-what need to be sorted out in practice. If you’ve under-costed any element of the project – your time, consumables, travel and subsistence – you’ll have to deal with it, and it might not be much fun.
  • Congratulations, you’ve just signed yourself up for a shedload of admin. Even with the best and most supportive post-award team, you’ll have project management to do. Financial monitoring; recruitment, selection, and line management of one or more research associates. And it doesn’t finish when the research finishes – thanks to the impact agenda, you’ll probably be reporting on your project via Researchfish for years to come.
  • Every time any comparable call comes round in the future, your colleagues will ask you give a presentation about your application/sit on the internal sifting panel/undertake peer review. Once a funding agency has given you money, you can bet they’ll be asking you to peer review other applications. Listed as a cost for workload purposes, but there are also a lot of benefits to getting involved in peer reviewing applications because it’ll improve your own too. Also, the chances are that you benefited from such support/advice from senior colleagues, so pay it forward. But be ready to pay.
  • You’ve just raised the bar for yourself. Don’t be surprised if certain people in research management start talking about your next project before this one is done as if it’s a given or an inevitability.
  • Unless you’re careful, you may not see as much recognition in your workload as you might have expected. Of course, your institution is obliged to make the time promised in the grant application available to you, but unless you’ve secured agreement in advance, you may find that much of this is taken out of your existing research allocation rather than out of teaching and admin. Especially as these days we no longer thing of teaching as a chore to buy ourselves out from. Think very carefully about what elements of your workload you would like to lose if your application is successful.
  • The potential envy and enmity of colleagues who are picking up bits of what was your work.

If you’re unsuccessful…

Benefits…

  • The chances are that there’s plenty to be salvaged even from an unsuccessful application. Once you’ve gone through the appropriate stages of grief, there’s a good chance that there’s at least one paper (even if ‘only’ a literature review) in the work that you’ve done. If you and your academic colleagues and your stakeholders are still keen, the chances are that there’s something you can do together, even if it’s not what you ideally wanted to do.
  • Writing an application will force you to develop your research ideas. This is particularly the case for career young researchers, where the pursuit of one of those long-short Fellowships can be worth it if only to get proper support in developing your research agenda.
  • If you’ve submitted a credible, competitive application, you’ve at least shown willing in terms of grant-getting. No-one can say that you haven’t tried. Depending on the pressures/expectations you’re under, having had a credible attempt at it buys you some license to concentrate on your papers for a bit.
  • If it’s your first application, you’ll have learnt a lot from the process, and you’ll be better prepared next time. Depending on your field, you could even add a credible unsuccessful application to a CV, or a job application question about grant-getting experience.
  • If your institution has an internal peer review panel or other selection process, you’ve put you and your research onto the radar of some senior people. You’ll be more visible, and this may well lead to further conversations with colleagues, especially outside your school. In the past I’ve recommended that people put forward internal expressions of interest even if they’re not sure they’re ready for precisely this reason.

Costs…

  • You’ve just wasted your time – and quite a lot of time at that. And not just work time… often evenings and weekends too.
  • It’ll come as a disappointment, which may take some time to get over
  • Even if you’ve kept it quiet, people in your institution will know that you’ve been unsuccessful.

I’ve written two longer pieces on what to do if your research grant application is unsuccessful, which can be found here and here.