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Peer Review College Newsletter Peer Review College Newsletter Winter 2013 Introduction CONTENTS Welcome to the Winter 2013 issue of the College newsletter. Firstly may we thank you 1. Centres for Doctoral all for your continuing support of EPSRC Peer Review, which this year included the Training – EPSRC’s Centres for Doctoral Training exercise, which is EPSRC’s largest peer review exercise Largest Ever Peer Review to date. Exercise – page 1 We have now completed our latest annual refresh of the College membership, and 2. College Refresh include a list of new members appointed as a result of the exercise. Exercise – page 2 We also include our first articles provided by two of our College members on their 3. Forthcoming Changes experiences as panel members. to the College Member activity report – page 3 Centres for Doctoral Training – EPSRC’s Largest 4. Experiences at an EPSRC Ever Peer Review Exercise panel – page 4 5. Review of Strategic Interview panels on 23rd and 24th October saw the culmination of a major peer review Advice – page 5 exercise for EPSRC to commit £350 million to support Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) across the UK. This is the UK’s largest investment in postgraduate training in 6. Review of Peer Review engineering and physical sciences. It will fund over seventy new Centres for Doctoral – page 5 Training (CDTs), spread across 24 UK universities. 7. Membership Matters Over the two days of interview panels 500 of the UK’s top scientists and engineers, – page 7 many of them EPSRC College members, presented proposals to host Centres for Doctoral Training at their universities. It was not just as applicants that EPSRC 8. Editors End Piece College members were an essential part of the CDT exercise. A total of 587 college – page 8 members provided reviews for the exercise and 58 college members took part in the assessment of proposals as panel members. Sir Keith Burnett, who oversaw the interview process, commented: “It’s inspiring to see what the engineering and physical sciences community in the UK has to offer. We would like to thank everyone who took part and helped to make this the biggest single peer review exercise EPSRC has ever undertaken. It’s remarkable that so many people were able to come together to discuss the future issues and opportunities around post-graduate training in this way.” EPSRC-funded Centres for Doctoral Training are based in universities and focus on major research challenges, and the UK’s most important sectors, key technologies and most competitive future markets including aerospace, pharmaceuticals, healthcare technologies, automotive, digital, energy and construction. PhD students in Centres for Doctoral Training develop strong research skills, gaining both depth and breadth of knowledge. They will have opportunities to undertake multi- disciplinary and collaborative research, with peer to peer learning. Peer Review College Newsletter EPSRC’s investment in Centres for Doctoral Training was announced by Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts on 22nd November at a press conference at the top of BT Tower in London. Science Minister David Willetts said: “Scientists and engineers are vital to our economy and society. It is their talent and imagination, as well as their knowledge and skills, that inspire innovation and drive growth across a range of sectors, from manufacturing to financial services. I am particularly pleased to see strong partnerships between universities, industry and business among the new centres announced today. This type of collaboration is a key element of our industrial strategy and will continue to keep us at the forefront of the global science race.” College Refresh Exercise The EPSRC Peer Review College has now successfully completed its second annual refresh. The annual refresh aims to rebalance the college based on the areas of research that applications are being made against and to replace those members who have stepped down. Following this year’s refresh, the college now stands at approximately 4000 members. During the 2013 refresh exercise we invited almost 400 new members. To date almost 90% have agreed to join the College. For details of the potential sources of new members please see the Autumn 2011 college newsletter http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/newsletters/ CollegeNewsletterAutumn2011.pdf 2 Peer Review College Newsletter Forthcoming Changes to the College Member activity report These reports, introduced in 2011, include information on reviews sent to and completed by individual College members, and enables a comparison of performance with the College as a whole. Feedback from College members has been generally very positive. However, following the feedback from our 2013 college survey we have further updated the report format to display this information more clearly. These latest changes will see a split in the various measures shown in the report to better reflect your activities as a college member during the year. All of the top measures will reflect the number of requests to review issued during the report year and the responses received. For example, if you received five requests to review, responded to three and were unable to complete two, this will be reflected in the first part of the report (Number of Responses by Classification Type) as 60% Usable Responses. Example completed with test data The middle section of the reports (not illustrated) will continue to show comparative review scores and panel member scores on your reviews but only for applications where a funding decision was made in the report year. This ensures that a complete set of data is available on each proposal for you to compare. Information on proposals where you have provided a review this year, but the funding decision was made after the end of 2013, will be included in the report covering activity in 2014. The last section remains unchanged – showing panels attended, training and classifications. This year’s report will be sent early in March to allow time for reviews which are in progress to be completed and returned. 3 Peer Review College Newsletter Experiences at an EPSRC panel In this newsletter we are pleased to include the thoughts and experiences of two of our College members who have been part of a review panel in 2013. Dr Peter Hall is a reader in the department of Computer Science and director of the Media Technology Research Centre, both at the University of Bath. He has been a College member since 2006. “In June 2013 the EPSRC asked me to sit on an ICT panel. We considered several different types of grant proposal: fellowships, first proposals, and standard responsive mode. Details aside, the mechanics were straightforward. Each proposal was allocated three ‘speakers’ who were to describe the proposal, the reviews, and the response to the panel. The job of the panel was to collate this information into a rank- ordered list, more exactly one list for each proposal type. I was impressed by both the level of expertise around the table, and the diligence expended. I personally spent some two full days preparing to speak, and others reported a similar effort. The panel stuck to the rules: a description of the proposal was for information only; ranking was based on reviews and responses alone. We made a real effort to link the comments of the reviewers to the numerical scores they had given. The most useful reviews made this link easy to explain. We also made a real effort to link the investigators response to the reviewer’s comments. There was no preference for any particular structure of response, but content that clearly addressed issues raised tended to be viewed more favourably. Risking anecdote, it seemed to me that the final outcome was influenced most strongly by the reviews, but that a good response could lift a proposal several ranking places – enough to carry it over the funding threshold. Also, the initial rank ordering made by panel members independently ahead of the meeting correlated well, suggesting some degree of objectivity. Overall, I left the meeting satisfied the panel acts as fairly as it can.” Dr Ioannis Ieropoulos is an Associate Professor in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of the West of England. He has been a College member since 2010 and attended his first panel meeting this March. “The peer review prioritisation panel was an extremely useful and important experience, since it allowed me to take part in the decision-making process at the Panel level, and has therefore provided invaluable insight. The whole process is efficient and professional and I particularly appreciated the opportunity to declare any conflicts of interest with any one of the proposals for assessment, which was carried through to the Panel Meeting, where the relevant panel member was kindly asked to leave the room. The Meeting Organisers were very responsive to queries raised, especially when key documents were absent from the large hard-copy files due to late responses from applicants or when email firewall problems prevented secure communication, which was extremely useful for a new member of the panel. As a commitment it was rather heavy, due to the number of proposals that we had to assess, but the process of assessment and the systematic paperwork were efficient and sufficiently comprehensive, to make it easier for us and feasible to complete 4 Peer Review College Newsletter within the timeline given. I very much appreciated the opportunity to meet with peers from different parts of the UK, who are renowned authorities in their respective fields, and with whom we shared as common ground, the Panel topic. The last stage of proposal prioritisation was the most challenging, since this is the stage where the decision* is made to fund only a small number of successful proposals from a total of largely high-quality submissions.” [*Editor’s note – the panel makes a funding recommendation] In Brief - Reviews Earlier this year EPSRC announced its decision to commission two independent reviews: one to look at how EPSRC obtains strategic advice to help it develop effective policies, and one to evaluate our overall peer-review processes.
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