Peer review principles

We make all our funding decisions based on expert advice so peer review is at the heart of our business. We think it’s important that we use peer review with integrity and in a consistent way so all EPSRC funding initiatives follow a number of principles.

We believe these principles constitute a robust and quality assessment process:

Transparency	Publish the criteria for assessing proposals and details of the peer review process before applicants submit proposals, defining how the assessment process will operate and be managed.
Appropriateness	Use a peer review process that is appropriate to the type of proposed research and in proportion with the investment and complexity of the work.
Managing interests	Ask all participants to declare interests when carrying out peer review activities so that any conflicts can be identified and managed.
Confidentiality	Treat proposals in confidence and ask those who advise us to do the same.
Expert assessment	Use expert peer reviewers, mainly from EPSRC’s college of reviewers, to assess the individual merit of all proposals against the published criteria.
Prioritisation	Prioritise proposals for funding by assessing the merit of each proposal against that of others if its expert assessment has been sufficiently supportive.
Right to reply	Give principal investigators the right to reply to the expert reviewers’ assessments when proposals are being prioritised.
Separation of duties	Separate peer review of proposals against the assessment criteria from making funding decisions. EPSRC staff will make funding decisions based on peer review advice, taking into account budgets available and the competing tensions between budgets. Those acting as peers will not also be responsible for authorising the funding decision.
No parallel assessment	Avoid carrying out multiple parallel assessments of a proposal’s relative merit.

You can expect these principles to apply to the assessment of full proposals submitted through our responsive mode funding, calls for proposals and all grant schemes that are peer reviewed. They do not apply to schemes like doctoral training grants, which are calculated using an algorithm.

If there are any exceptions to these principles we will clearly state them at the time the call or scheme is established.