Posters

Ivan Buljan*, Department of Research in Biomedicine and Health, University of Split School of Medicine, Split, Croatia
David Pina, European Research Executive Agency, Brussels, Belgium
Ana Marušić, Department of Research in Biomedicine and Health, University of Split School of Medicine, Split, Croatia

Background: Ethics evaluation of research proposals is an important part of ensuring the quality of funded research. Systematic evaluation of ethics issues started in Horizon 2020 EU research framework but there is little evidence on the outcomes of the ethics review of grant proposals. Our objective was to assess the ethical issues identified by applicants and ethical requirements from ethics evaluation panels for grant proposals for Maria Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) and European Research Council (ERC).

Methods: We analysed anonymized datasets for 3,054 MSCA individual fellowships (IF), 417 MSCA Innovative Training Networks (ITN), and 1,465 ERC from 2016 to 2019.

Results: Most of the identified ethics issues by both applicants and ethics experts were in the ethics categories related to humans; protection of personal data; environment, health and safety; and non-EU countries. Ethics experts identified twice as many ethics issues compared to applicants across funding schemes, years, and high- vs low-research performing countries. ERC grants had the highest number of ethics requirements per proposal, compared to ITN and IF grants. The majority of requirements had to be fulfilled after grant agreement.

Conclusions: Many applicants for highly competitive H2020 funding schemes lack awareness of ethics issues raised by their proposed research. There is a need for better training of researchers at all career stages about ethics issues in research, more support to researchers from research organizations to follow the funding agencies requirements, as well as further development and harmonization of the ethics appraisal process during grant assessment.

References

Buljan I, Pina DG, Marušić A. Ethics issues identified by applicants and ethics experts in Horizon 2020 grant proposals [version 1; peer review: 2 approved]. F1000Research. 2021, 10:471. (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.52965.1 )

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this description are strictly those of the authors and may in no circumstances be regarded as an official position of the Research Executive Agency or the European Commission.

Ivan Buljan*, Department of Research in Biomedicine and Health, University of Split School of Medicine, Split, Croatia
David Pina, European Research Executive Agency, Brussels, Belgium
Ana Marušić, Department of Research in Biomedicine and Health, University of Split School of Medicine, Split, Croatia

Background: Evaluation of research grants should ensure that the best projects are funded and that there is no research waste. The EU’s Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation evaluation process has evolved over time in that attempt. For the Marie Curie research funding programme, changes were observed in 2014 – with a reduction of the number of evaluation criteria – and in 2016 – with some calls moving from in-person to virtual consensus meetings for expert reviewers. In this study, we assessed how these changes affected expert evaluation.

Methods: We analysed the data on scores for over 75,000 Marie Curie proposals from 2007 to 2018 from three type of grants. We assessed the Consensus Report (CR) scores and the average of Individual Evaluation Reports (IER) scores about the quality of the proposal, and the average deviation (AD) indices as a measure of the dispersion of reviewers’ evaluations. We used interrupted time series analysis to compare the CR scores and AD indices across years, type of grants and scientific panels.

Results: For all three types of grants, there was a minor shift (less than one point on a scale form 0-100) in CR scores and AD indices when moving from in-person to remote consensus meetings, and there were small differences across different scientific panels. Proposals which had greater disagreement between reviewers had lower CR scores, across all type of grants and panels.

Conclusion: Changes in the assessment of Marie Curie proposals did not affect the review process outcomes, which remained stable over time.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this description are strictly those of the authors and may in no circumstances be regarded as an official position of the Research Executive Agency or the European Commission.

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