Applicant Response to Referee Comments

As part of our ongoing commitment to continuously improve the service we offer to grant applicants, a new feedback process will be introduced for project grant and university award grant applications that are to be considered by Funding Committees from January 2010 onwards. Under the new arrangements, lead applicants will be invited to respond to the referees’ comments ahead of the relevant Funding Committee meeting, and these responses will be available to the Funding Committee when it makes its decisions.

This change will bring the assessment and decision-making process for project grants and university awards in line with other schemes, including programme grants. Applicants should note however that:

• These arrangements will not apply to all grant schemes. The application process guidance notes for each scheme will detail whether these arrangements apply.
• In certain circumstances, it will not be possible to feed back referee comments for a response.

The New Feedback and Response Process is as follows:

• Lead applicants will be invited to submit a single summary response to anonymised referees’ comments on behalf of all the applicants.
• The Trust will endeavour to send these comments to applicants by email approximately five to six weeks before a Committee meeting.
• Applicants will be asked to provide a response to the referees’ comments within seven days.
• Responses to the referees’ comments must be limited to one side of A4. This page limit should be strictly adhered to and applicants should thus only address the substantive points made by the referees.
• Should lead applicants fail to return their response within seven days, the Trust cannot guarantee that these comments will be included in the information provided to Committee members.
• Any referee reports that the Trust has not sent to applicants will be marked as “Not seen by the applicants” in the information provided to Committee members. These reports will be forwarded to applicants with the notification of the outcome of the proposal.

General guidance:

• Applicants are reminded that reports received from peer reviewers constitute only a part of the whole application evaluation process. Committee members are asked to make their own independent judgements of the merit of applications by moderating the referees’ comments. It is stressed therefore that positive comments received from peer reviewers are not in themselves a guarantee of success.
• Peer reviewers may ask for their comments to be kept confidential. These requests will be respected and reports will not be sent to the applicants for a response.
• Some referee comments are not received until shortly before the Funding Committee meeting. It may not be possible to seek an applicant response to these comments.
• Trust staff will communicate only with the lead applicant who will have responsibility for ensuring that all correspondence reaches the co-applicants and any key collaborators.