The need for speed

How is UKRI going to cut grant processing times in half? This was the big rabbit in the hat of the funder’s five-year strategy: a pledge to cut median grant processing times in half over the period, with incremental progress each year on the journey to 90 days for applicant-led calls, and just 60 days for targeted calls.

It is presented as a stretch target – Ian Chapman said as much in Parliament a few weeks back. “We are setting ourselves deliberately ambitious targets,” he said – UKRI was said to need “an ambitious target to drive us to be much quicker at responding to what researchers need.”

The strategy puts forward a few tools to achieve the required speed – a sprinkling of demand management here, a dash of distributed peer review there, the inevitable glug of AI (to winnow down the AI-inflated avalanche of submissions, presumably, leaving us back where we began).

Speaking to the Lords science committee, the UKRI chief executive had a few other suggestions: more programme-led commissioning, a focus on “fewer but larger” calls in some places, and increasing assessment capacity.

This latter idea is the most interesting one for the kind of argument we like to have in this column – greater use of desk rejection by UKRI staff, as the strategy delivery plan puts it, or “quality triage” (in Chapman’s words to the committee) of the sort that journals happily employ.

This is all in the testing phase at the moment, under the auspices of the Metascience Unit, whose ongoing work on desk rejection was more thoroughly explored in its annual review last year. It was noted that currently UKRI puts out to peer review “all applications that meet a minimum criterion of compliance” despite the “constant challenge” of finding willing external reviewers. The unit had been provided with anecdotal evidence that research council funding managers could often tell when an application is likely to be rejected outright by a panel.

Now, it was noted in the report that UKRI staff are public employees, and asking them to judge scientific quality “could be seen to be going against the spirit of the Haldane Principle” (a cause close to our heart). But it was also noted that the Higher Education and Research Act is flexible in its drafting as to – arguably – allow this.

“Robust evidence” that UKRI staff would assess similarly to independent panels “might serve as a productive contribution to this debate,” the metascience report concludes – and that is indeed what a current “shadow experiment” taking place within UKRI is seeking to provide.

It’s unlikely that an expanded role for UKRI staff in the early stages of grant assessment will in itself set too many cats among pigeons – but the question inevitably then becomes: so what’s next? Chapman said that UKRI is going to “talk to the community at great length” about any changes to the peer review process.

One to watch – especially as the strategy also aims for UKRI to reduce the proportion of its resources it devotes to grant processing. You can’t reliably increase internal capacity while at the same time spending less. 

Spotted a politician meddling in the research system? Or a blurry line between academia and government? Email the man himself: haldane [at] researchagenda [dot] news