Swiss national funder introducing lottery tie-breaker across calls

‘Unbiased’ approach will be used if peer review and debates cannot separate proposals

The Swiss National Science Foundation, a public R&D funder, is introducing the use of a lottery across all its funding schemes, to decide between competing proposals deemed to have equal merit.

The SNSF trialled lotteries for tie-breaking evalution in its postdoctoral mobility funding scheme between 2018 and 2020. After reviewing the trial, its executive board decided to roll out the last resort to all of its funding schemes.