Statistics and OR grant submissions to the Mathematics Panel
The EPSRC announced earlier this year that the grants budget
of its Mathematics Programme is to increase, so that new
grants awarded in the Programme in 2000/01 will rise to £ 8.5
million pounds, from 6.55 million pounds. Some of this
increase will filter through to the responsive mode operation,
for allocating research grants. It is therefore even more
important than before, that the responsive mode system works
fairly, and is seen to do so.
Currently, if statistics or OR proposals are submitted to the
EPSRC in the responsive mode, then typically they will be
considered in competition with more numerous pure and applied
proposals. The result has been in recent years that the panel
members that rank the proposals in order of scientific merit
are chosen to reflect the expertise needed to judge the
volume of proposals, and so have relatively few statistics and
OR colleagues involved in the assessment.
This situation has been regarded as unsatisfactory by the
statistics and OR communities for some time. As a result, a
working group, comprising the signatories to this document,
produced a paper outlining an alternative approach to the way
that grant proposals submitted to responsive mode are judged.
This paper was endorsed by the Executive Committee of the
Royal Statistical Society, the Education and Research
Committee of the OR Society, and the Committee of Professors
in Operational Research. One feature of the paper was that
proposals are best judged by experts from the appropriate
fields, who are better placed to make assessments, and
interpret referee reports. The paper may be viewed at the
URL: www.rss.org.uk/archive/epsrc/.
At a meeting with Alasdair Rose and John Wand from the EPSRC,
held at the RSS on Friday, 19th May, this paper was discussed.
Although the proposals were greeted with some understanding,
the EPSRC was not inclined to implement them. However, the
EPSRC would not object if subject groupings, such as
statistics and OR wanted to "batch" their grant proposals in
time, in effect working to subject-imposed informal deadlines
of, eg., October 2nd and April 9th. If members of the two
communities can schedule the submission of their grant
proposals to match these two dates, then the resulting volumes
of proposals should ensure a far better representation of
statistics and OR expertise on the panels that judge the
proposals under consideration. Of course, this applies only to
proposals relevant to the EPSRC Mathematics Programme; EPSRC
reserves the right to place proposals with the most
appropriate programme for consideration.
This is not the solution that we wanted. However, for the
moment, it is the best that is on offer. We recommend to the
statistics and OR communites that they adopt this batching
proposal for the coming academic year, on a trial basis, with
the results to be evaluated in July 2001.
Robert Curnow Robert Fildes Byron Morgan Lyn Thomas
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