UKRI Delivery Plan Top Trumps

For us research policy nerds, the past week has been like Christmas. Each of the constituent parts of UK Research and Innovation, as well as the all seeing eye that watches over them, have all produced their Delivery Plans.

These flesh out the - ahem -  'Strategic Prospectus', which was published last year. How long are these valid for? Well, that's moot, but at least until the next Comprehensive Spending Review (so 2019-20) after which it will 'update our 'near-term actions' to reflect the financial years covered in the SR.'

Dude, Who's Got My Twitter?

@NIHR, apparently. Or possibly a forgotten Britpop band

It's a fast moving world in the Twittersphere, and you have to be quick to bag the Twitter handle that is, well, your birthright. Some, such as @BBSRC, were super sharp and got theirs [shame they won't be around much longer - Ed], although that might be more down to the implausibility of any other person/organisation having that acronym. But what about others who were - um - a bit slower or have common arconyms? Dude, who's got my Twitter?

The Joy of Six

Life on Quality St: the three speakers in action

The ‘Essential Elements of a Successful Application’ workshop is like the purple one in Quality Street: it’s a perennial favourite. We’ve been running variations on it since we began the Grants Factory in 2009, and there is always a good turnout and a stimulating discussion. I’ve written up some notes from previous sessions here, here, here and here (I could go on). Friday’s iteration was no different.

Praxi MacPraxface

Call that a name? Delegates at the Praxis MacPraxface Conference 2016 have a go at renaming the organisation

Exciting news has reached us about a new naming competition. As you know, there's nothing we like more than a naming competition. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I think the success of NERC's boat-naming scheme, and the subsequent competition to rename David Attenborough, demonstrate that we have nothing to fear. 

NERC Launches Competition to Rename Sir David Attenborough

Whisper McWhisperface

Following the news that NERC had ignored the popular vote and named its new research ship Sir David Attenborough (the fourth most popular entry, lagging some 113,086 behind the winner, Boaty McBoatface), the Research Council has moved to placate its critics by launching a new competition: to rename Sir David Attenborough.

Marky McSpenceface

First output from NERC/M&S
Collaboration:
'Chocky McChockface'

Following the exciting news of the NERC/M&S link up, the CEO of M&S, Steve 'Cod' Rowe announced plans to 'learn from the best in engaging with our customers'.

As a result they have decided to follow NERC's lead and hold a competition to rename all their foodstuffs. 'What could possibly go wrong?' asked Rowe.

Meanwhile, in M&S...

A NERC scientist chats happily to an M&S worker. Possibly

It was announced yesterday that NERC and Marks and Spencer would share data. Now read on.

The check out of Marks and Spencer’s. A woman is at the check out with a Per Una top and a plastic box of chocolate bites.

Check out Assistant: That will be £53.99, please. Can I interest you in our store card?

Customer (fumbling for her credit card): Um, no, that’s alright, thanks.

Check out Assistant: You get an extra 10% off today’s purchase.

Customer: No, I’m fine, thank you.

Check out Assistant: You can spread the payments. Help you to manage your costs.

Customer: No, I really am fine, thanks.

Check out Assistant; Very reasonable rates.

Customer: No.

Check out Assistant: No problem madam. We do have an offer on the chocolate bites today. Buy two, get a third half price.

Customer: No, thanks. I only want the one.

Check out Assistant: I understand madam. Can I interest you in a Research Strategy?

Going down with All Hands

RRS Boaty McBoatface

Last week NERC launched a competition to name its new £200m research ship, due for completion in 2019.

'Shackleton. Endeavour. Falcon. These are just some of the names suggested for the UK's next world-class polar research ship as part of a campaign launched today for the public to put forward names for the state-of-the-art vessel to be built in the North West of England', trumpeted its press release

But no mention of 'Boaty McBoatface,' which is the current frontrunner. As I write, it has almost ten times as many votes as the next most popular, Henry Worsley (21,867 against 2,746).

NERC Demand Management: a Clarification

NERC

Polaris House

Swindon
SN2 1EU

Dear Vice Chancellor

I am writing to you in connection with our recent announcement about measures we are introducing to manage the demand for NERC funding.

As you will have seen, we are planning to cut the maximum funding level for standard grants (from £1.2m to £800k, fEC), but we will also be restricting the number of applications from those institutions which have a success rate of less than 20%.

We have had a number of queries about the methodology we will be using to decide whether institutions fall within this bracket. When we explain the system, we are often met with looks of puzzlement and confusion, and are asked to explain it again. And again. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that it is an unnecessarily complicated and burdensome system.

The Battle of the RCUK Research Ships

NERC's new polar research ship

Excitement was palpable at Death Star House this morning as NERC unveiled plans for it's new polar research ship. Painted a bold, brazen red, with 'SCIENCE' emblazoned on its side, the ship will send out a positive signal that the UK is serious about scientific research.

The CEO of NERC, Prof Duncan Wingham, purred through what the ship had to offer. 'This vessel will be equipped to support oceanographic, marine ecosystem, geophysical and other research activities.'

Not to be outdone, however, Prof Rick Rylance, head of the AHRC, spoke to a hastily convened press conference elsewhere in the building.

'I'm pleased to announce that the AHRC will be launching a Humanities 'Super Yacht,'' he said. To gasps of astonishment, Rylance held up what was clearly a badly photoshopped image of a speed boat with 'HUMANITIES' written across it.

AHRC's 'Super Yacht': Rylance's Artist's Impression

'The yacht will be fuelled with the redundant words that have been stripped out of research proposals,' claimed Rylance. 'We've built up quite a stock pile of unnecessary padding. It's completely valueless in terms of application content, but we've found that it burns very nicely'.

He went on: 'we believe we have enough 'overarching's and 'lacuna's to power us around the world fifteen times. But should we ever get through these we have reserves of 'furthermore's and 'step change's.'

It is understood that candidates for the post of ESRC Chief Executive will be asked to present at interview a model of a possible SOCIAL SCIENCES research ship. Fundermentals has spoken to one of the front runners for the job, who has spent several nights gluing together match sticks to recreate the Dunkirk 'flotilla of small boats'.

RCUK Scrabble

It's holiday season, even for the good folks at Death Star Avenue. Now read on.

A holiday cottage on the west coast of Wales. Rain is lashing against the windows, and the casements are rattling. It's August. A group of RCUK apparatchiks are huddled around a game of Scrabble. It's clear they're playing an unusual variant of this family favourite in which only acronyms can be used.

Changes to NERC Peer Review

NERC is introducing changes to its peer review process to improve 'consistency, quality and transparency'. In an email to peer review college (PRC) members, the Council set out what will stay the same and what will change.

What will stay the same? 

The central role and importance of the PRC will remain. However, it wants to allow for more 'inclusivity and flexibility', whilst recognising the need for 'consistency, particularly in panel membership.'

What will change? 

• Timing of peer review periods, to try and avoid overlap with each other and major university holidays. They will also confirm membership and dates earlier in the process. 
• More consistent panel membership and more stable panel portfolios. There will be a new role of ‘core’ member, and they will have a primary responsibility for attending moderating panel meetings in a particular panel area, forming half of the panel membership. Other PRC members will be invited on an ad hoc basis. All current PRC members will be considered for 'core' membership, which will be fixed term.  
• More consistent review levels and the removal of the ‘sift’ process.  Reviewers will no longer be asked to complete reviews where they judge that they have low expertise. In addition, moderating panels will consider all proposals submitted to a call, so meetings will be longer (held over two days) and the role of panel member even more central to the funding and assessment process. 
• A pre-score process will be introduced to allow panels to prioritise proposals for discussion. Pre-scores for excellence will be required from panel members at least 1 week before meetings. 
• Better Performance monitoring and management. Performance standards will be introduced and more closely monitored on a PRC and individual level. There will also be on-line training for all members to ensure that members continue to be aware of what is expected of them and any changes to policy;

When will these changes happen? 

From January 2014. The PRC year will start from January rather than July from that point onwards. In the meantime there will be a call for new membership in June 2013.

'Frog One' to Head Science at NERC

It's been a while, hasn't it? And hey, it is (nearly) the end of the week. So here's another in our sporadic series of lookalikes. This time NERC has taken the brave move to appoint the baddie from 1971 thriller The French Connection as its Director of Science.
Iain Gilliespie, AKA Alan Charnier, AKA 'Frog One', was previously Head of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s Science and Technology Policy Division. As far as Fundermentals is aware, he has never tried to smuggle anything, from Marseilles or elsewhere, in the boot of an unsuspecting French TV personality. However, if anyone has information to the contrary...

Charnier

Gillespie

RCUK Decent Success Rate Shock!

'100% you say? Well I'm sure
I could make my Chaucer
project fit  'Environmental Change''

Now here's a good news story that the Research Councils have been remarkably slow to crow about: success rates for most are looking surprisingly healthy. Looking at the latest published stats (RCUK has gathered links to them all here, including a broken AHRC one. *sigh* Best go direct, here), they give a lie to the current feeling that RCUK success rates have fallen so low that you may as well buy a ticket to EuroMillions. The  success rates for the five councils that have produced them for 2011-12 range from 21-41%, and average a healthy 31%.

Of course, there are a number of factors which have buoyed the figures:

• firstly, some Councils have either introduced, or are strongly encouraging, some form of demand management. This is almost certainly the reason for EPSRC's 41% success rate.
• secondly, other success rates are skewed by 100% success rates for some managed programmes, such as the 6 out of 6 that the AHRC's Researching Environment Change Follow Up scheme garnered. This helped the AHRC achieve an eye popping 40% success rate last year.
• finally, many have seen application numbers drop, not necessarily because of demand management, but perhaps because applicants have become demoralised by rejection, or their attention has been diverted elsewhere, such as on the REF, or teaching , or (perish the thought!) impact activities.

I've collated the figures I can find, and the full table of application numbers and success rates can be found (for Kent staff only, I'm afraid) on our SharePoint site.

RCUK Publishes Impact Case Studies

Last week RCUK published impact case studies. The intention of this was, I think, twofold: to highlight to external bodies (such as the Treasury) that public money is being well spent, and to highlight to potential applicants examples of best practice. Having read them all now I feel that they might have succeed at the latter, but not necessarily the former. Which is a shame, as I do think that it's crucial to make the case for the importance of research to government and the wider world.

The case studies are split into four categories: ‘policy’,‘business’, ‘public engagement’ and ‘voluntary and charitable’. Some appear in more than one category. RCUK had a huge pool of projects to choose from for their fourteen examples. The Research Councils give out grants for some 2,500 projects each year.As such, you would expect them to be spectacular examples of their kind, but I wasn't convinced.

Unsurprisingly, the business-related ones have the clearest impact and it is easy to make the case with these: licensing agreements, patents, and new technology with applications that will benefit society. All good. Things become a bit less clear in the other three categories which, to my mind, are somewhat weaker. Or rather, I think it’s very difficult to make the case. Many talk about ‘stakeholder engagement’, which of course is good, and of feeding into the development of policies and working practices. Which is also good. Others talk about their tweets and blogs, their public lectures and even their jazz compositions. Okay, so I know it's very hard to try and quantify the effect that these activities have had, but I would have thought that RCUK might have been able to provide more hard evidence as to the effect their funded research is having on society.

Nevertheless, I think the positive that potential applicants should take from this is that expectations are low and broad. If you can demonstrate that you are able and willing to engage with end users, to talk to school children and put on public events, then you will easily have met the expectations of your future paymasters. And, you never know, with your conceptual art spin-offs and children’s books sub-projects, you could well be up there on the RCUK website in years to come.

Beware the Poets

I'm worried about those clever people at Polaris House. Our great and glorious research leaders, those academic taste makers who hold UK funded research in the palms of their hands, seem to be entering the world of self parody.

A couple of weeks ago I devised the Research Council Priority Generator. This randomly mashed together abstract nouns to create strategic priorities that sounded edgy and thoughtful, but were ultimately empty and meaningless.

Whilst it highlighted how randomness could produce apparent profundity, I thought it was too exaggerated and  stupid to really bear any resemblance to reality. How wrong I was. Within hours of launching the Generator, the AHRC had produced its latest 'emerging theme': 'Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past'.

Beautiful. I couldn't have invented a better nonsense programme myself. But, oh, it got better. The AHRC weaved together a fine piece of poetic prose to explain the rationale of the theme: it was, they gushed, 'an opportunity for researchers...to generate new novel understandings of the relationship between the past and the future, and the challenges and opportunities of the present through a temporally inflected lens'.

'New novel'? Really? 'A temporally inflected lens'? If I had a temporally inflected lens I'd be sure to take it down to Jessops to have it looked at.

But the muse is upon them, and they continue in a stream of consciousness that would make Molly Bloom blush:

'...these include questions around what is meaningful about continuity and change, and the role that narratives, experiences, visualisations, performances and stories have to play in these processes. Issues around understanding modes of cultural learning and intergenerational equity, as well as questions relating to authority, ownership and justice within and across time, may help inform understanding of current and future global challenges faced by society today. Technological development, alternative lifestyle movements, and the nature of ideological and philosophical, ethical and creative, historicised and imagined perspectives jostle for attention and require a diversity of approaches and disciplinary engagements for the theme to reach its full potential.'

It's like a postmodern disciplinary shopping list, complete with an unreliable narrator. It's all there, but it's up the reader to try and make sense of it.

However, the AHRC is not alone in bowing to the creative urge. Following swiftly on this is EPSRC's announcement that it will be running a 'creativity greenhouse'. They've already had us playing in 'sandpits', and the TSB is encouraging us to develop 'catapaults'. What analogy, metaphor or simile will they reach for next? The ESRC Trouser Press? The NERC Hostess Trolley? The BBSRC Kenwood Mixer? Now there's an idea for a new generator...

But should we welcome all this creativity? After all, other great leaders have succumbed to the inner poet. Barack Obama has written poetry, as has Jimmy Carter. But then, apparently, so has Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible and Goebbels.

Hmm. On second thoughts perhaps the Research Councils should stick to their day jobs before they take UK research any further into this weird parallel universe.

Everything's ROS-y at NERC

NERC has decided to join AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC and ESRC and join the Research Outcomes System (ROS). This will take over from its Research Outputs Database (ROD), which they've been using for nearly a decade.

The Council make the case that this will:

• Reduce the reporting burden by reducing the number of equivalent systems;
• Simplify submission by moving to a more standardised questionnaire;
• Improve how publications are handled;
• Share information better between systems, reducing data entry and reducing transcription errors; and
• Improve the quality of performance information available to support the case for public investment in the environmental sciences.

What's not to like? Well, as reported here a few months back, the new system isn't without glitches. However, NERC isn't adopting it immediately. Oh no. As in the Life of Brian, this calls for immediate...discussion. NERC will bound into action by:

• Completing the current collection exercise on the existing system;
• Establishing a project to manage the process of adopting ROS for future years collection with Centre participation;
• Engaging with users through the project to ensure that user requirements are identified and met;
• Adapting ROS where necessary to address NERC requirements, including coverage of grants and Centre programmes; and
• To migrate, as necessary, historic data.

I love this, the snail-like progress of bureaucracy in motion. It is a thing of beauty. Now if you want more information as to where we are in the programme of NERC migration to ROS - and who doesn't? - it can be found here.

NERC Introduces Demand Management

NERC has become the third Research Council - after EPSRC and ESRC - to explicitly state that they want universities to 'self regulate' their applications. This announcement was triggered by worries about success rates in some of their schemes falling to 16%.

Whilst NERC already has in place some measures to 'manage demand' - eg limiting the number of applications an investigator can submit per call and restricting resubmissions - this hasn't stopped the success rates from sliding in recent years. They're hoping to reverse this by encouraging institutions to strip out applications which NERC would define as 'uncompetitive' (defined by them as scoring 6/10 or below at panel).

So what are they going to do?

• firstly, ask institutions to nominate a point of contact for demand management;
• secondly, in the summer, provide data on past performance to them. This will be repeated annually from autumn 2013. The data will apply to Urgency, Large and Standard Grants, but not Fellowships or outlines. It will include: success rates for all schemes; distribution of grades for funded and unfunded proposals by scheme; final moderated grades for all proposals from institution/department; relative performance of institution/department.
• thirdly, from autumn 2012 NERC will (ahem) 'engage in a strategic dialogue' with institutions to provide information and advice in support of demand management, including setting targets for changes in submission behaviours. They can't meet with everyone in the first year, so those with the most applications, or with black marks in the NERC copy book, will be the first to get a visit from 'the management.'

So, at the moment, it looks to be relatively light touch: more ESRC than EPSRC. However, there will be the expectation that all research organisation will have their own internal quality control systems in place.

Who will be the next Research Council to fall in to line? Given the recent rumblings from Death Star House, my money's on the AHRC...

NERC Increases Size of Peer Review College

Hot on the heels of the ESRC's announcement that it is seeking new panel members, NERC is taking on additional members for its Peer Review College, raising the number from 450 to 600. This is 'to make involvement in NERC peer review activities more manageable and to allow NERC to widen the expertise-base of the College'. It is looking for members with all types of environmental sciences expertise, including those from the public and private sector user communities. The deadline for nominations is 27 January. More info here.

This, I think, is a Good Thing. One of the reasons for academics to fight shy of getting involved with the funders is the workload. If the research councils are able to increase the available pool of reviewers then, hopefully, it will lessen the load for all, as well as allowing more to see that the process of peer review is not the mysterious, loaded, unfair system that it can sometimes seem.

Further Changes to NERC Schemes

The Natural Environment Research Council has announced several changes to its responsive mode portfolio, which will take effect from 1 January.

Consortium Grants replaced by Large Grants
The Consortium Grant Responsive Mode scheme will be replaced by a new Large Grant scheme. The Large Grant scheme will continue to support adventurous, large-scale and complex research tackling big science questions, which cannot be addressed through other NERC funding opportunities. Key changes in comparison to the previous Consortium scheme are as follows:

• There will no longer be a requirement for a minimum of three eligible investigators based in separate participating organisations.
• A minimum funding level of £1·2m (100% FEC) will be introduced (the maximum funding level of £3·7m remains unchanged).
• There'll be an outline stage. This will be assess on 'potential excellence' and 'fit to scheme'.
• Next deadlines are: Outline Proposal Closing Date: 1 March 2012; Full Proposal Closing date: 15 November 2012 (tbc).
• The assessment process and documentation required for submitting Large Grant full proposals is unchanged from the Consortium scheme.

Standard Grants
A maximum funding level of £1·2m (100% FEC) will be introduced for Standard Grants. This change is to provide clear differentiation between the Standard Grant scheme and the new Large Grant scheme. The minimum funding level for Standard Grants is also amended to £65,000 (100% FEC).

New Investigator Grants
Following completion of the 2012 call (deadline 1 Feb), the New Investigator competition will cease to operate as a separate scheme and will be incorporated into the Standard Grant scheme. Eligibility will not change. New Investigator proposals will no longer be subject to any specific funding limits or restrictions. The ability to submit a New Investigator application via the Standard Grant call will be available from the December 2012 closing date onwards.

Urgency Grants
Some modifications will be made to clarify the remit of the scheme and circumstances that will be accepted as grounds for an Urgency application. The application and assessment process will also be updated.

There's no indication as to whether these changes are the result of the new moptop director,Duncan 'call me Rick' Wingham.