Research assessment: new panels, new luck? | bjoern.brembs.blog

For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their content, rather than counting the applicants’ previous publications. However, not all of DFG’s panels seem to be on board.

In the so-called “normal application procedure” of the DFG, research grant proposals are evaluated by a study section panel after formal peer-review. This panel then recommends the proposed projects to the main funding committee either unchanged or with a reduced budget or not at all. In times like these, when the number of eligible applications always exceeds the budget, it is not uncommon to find budget cuts even for approved applications. So when one of my own grant proposals (an extension of a previously funded grant) was evaluated recently, I wasn’t surprised to find that one of the two doctoral positions I had requested had been cut, rendering the proposed project unfeasible. This wasn’t the first time that such cuts had forced us to use the approved funds for a different project.

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