Application advice | Cash for Questions: Research funding, policy and development

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.

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?‘)

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.

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

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

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.