EPSRC: Update on changes, and advice on impact

Ah, Swindon. Photo by Peter Albanese on Unsplash

Polaris House, which houses UK Research and Innovation in Swindon, can seem like a fortress: powerful, mysterious, impenetrable. A little like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, in fact.

But last week the city gates were flung open to the UK’s research-management Munchkins and we gained a glimpse of what was going on behind the walls. Yes, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s annual webinar for research office staff took place, with representation from more than 60 universities and research organisations.

In terms of active research funding, the EPSRC is the largest of the research councils and we were given a whistlestop tour of what’s afoot. Here are my top takeaways:

• EPSRC is piloting or developing a number of schemes, including the New Horizons grants and the International Centre-to-Centre Research Collaborations. The former is relatively small scale, with a deadline of 18 June, and is intended to overcome the common accusation that EPSRC (and the research councils more generally) are somewhat risk averse. It offers £200,000 over two years “to provide space in the EPSRC portfolio for the very early exploration of new research”. As reported in Research Professional, the scheme is trialling a new assessment process: double blind batch review. The centre-to-centre scheme is a bigger beast. It is in its second iteration with a deadline on 8 September, and offers around £1 million for “projects that enable high-profile, best-with-best collaborations”.
• And it is reviewing others. Perhaps more significantly, it is reviewing one of the main pillars of its funding portfolio: fellowships. The aim, according to the literature, is to “open up more opportunities for research communities and enable a broader cohort of fellows to be supported across EPSRC’s remit”. We should know what that actually means in practice after the EPSRC council meeting in July, where the changes should be agreed. It’s also reviewing its support for doctoral education. There’s already been a series of virtual workshops around this, as well as engagement with delivery partners. A community survey and call for evidence will go live later in the year. The underlying principles will be developed throughout the summer, and the subsequent mechanisms will be considered in the autumn and winter.
• It is responding to Covid-19. As well as these reviews and launches, the council has had to deal with the challenge of the coronavirus. Like other research councils it is extending deadlines to existing calls, and considering six-month costed extensions for PhD students. It has made funding available specifically for Covid-19-related research and also provided some helpful guidance for applicants, including a list of potential questions of interest. In addition, the council is encouraging existing award holders to repurpose their projects wherever possible. Apparently, however, there has been a low uptake for this so far.
• It is rethinking its online presence. EPSRC is involved in developing a single website for the seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK. The first phase of this will take place in the autumn, when an interim site will be launched with a single ‘funding finder’ portal. This portal will potentially be very useful, having all the UKRI opportunities in one place, as well as mechanisms for applying and managing grants. This should benefit applicants by offering a simpler process—including only needing to enter data once: imagine that—clear guidance, and an opportunity to check progress. It will benefit research offices by alerting them to applications being made, enabling them to set approval rights, and notifying them of outcomes and feedback. They will run two or three pilots over the summer to test functionality. This will be followed in early 2021 with all sites being fully transitioned to UKRI.org, and the individual ones being closed.

Following this update, Lynne McCorriston, an EPSRC secondee working at the University of Glasgow, offered some advice on a subject that many researchers and research office staff are struggling with: how to incorporate impact into applications to the council, now that the “pathways to impact” section has been dropped from applications.

Embedding impact in your case for support

The council has revised its assessment criteria for reviewers in light of this change, we were told. As part of the primary ‘quality’ criterion, applications will now be assessed for “the suitability of the proposed methodology and the appropriateness of the approach to achieving impact”.

McCorriston suggested that the case for impact now needed to be threaded through each part of the case for support:

• Track record: you should explain how the non-academic partners are integral to the project, ideally as co-designers of the research, and what their role will be.
• Background: although you will still need to explain the background to the research, you should also give policy, industrial need and societal context for the work.
• Research hypothesis and objectives: as well as the objectives for the basic research, you should include measurable objectives for impacts too.
• Programme and methodology: what impact-related activities will you include? You should be creative and think broadly. They can include workshops, videos, training, sharing tools and techniques, for instance.

She also emphasised that the cost of undertaking impact activities could and should be included in the application. Surprisingly few applicants did this, she warned, and the absence of thorough costing raises doubts among panellists and reviewers as to whether the proposed impact activities are feasible.

Sharing plans and encouraging dialogue benefits both funder and university. I came away from the webinar feeling that I understood EPSRC’s outlook a little better, and could therefore plan more constructively for the road ahead. And I didn’t have to fight off any winged monkeys to do so.

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in May 2020 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com.