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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
