The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has made changes to its policy that restricts “repeatedly unsuccessful” applicants in applying for more grants.
The changes, to take effect from 1 October, will make it slightly harder for researchers to be classified as repeatedly unsuccessful. Applicants that have been labelled as repeatedly unsuccessful are constrained to submit only one application during a 12-month probation period under the policy.
To suffer these sanctions, a researcher needs to have an overall personal success rate of less than 25 per cent over two years and three or more applications within the same period ranked in the bottom half of a funding prioritisation list or rejected by a panel.
However, the council has announced that rejected proposals considered “out-of-remit” by the EPSRC Remit Group will no longer be included in the calculations to determine the researchers’ success rates.
In addition, it will not count proposals in the bottom half of prioritisation-rank lists that contain less than 10 applications. Previously, only lists of five or less applications were excluded from such ‘bottom-half-of-the-list’ calculations. However, applications on such lists will continue to be a factor in determining an applicant’s personal success rate.
The council has also decided to make exceptions to applications during its sifting stage. Under such changes, applications that have reached the second/interview stage in the process will not be included in the ‘bottom-half-of-the list’ calculation, no matter how low they rank.
The EPSRC originally introduced its controversial policy in a bid to boost its success rate of grant applications, which was as low as 26 per cent in 2008-09. Success rates have since increased to 36 per cent in 2010-11.
In a previous interview with Research Fortnight, EPSRC chief executive David Delpy has said that the number of applications to the council is “down by about 35 per cent”.
The council says that the changes to the policy have been made following a review which “considered feedback received from the research community”.