ESF Member Organisation Forum on Peer Review

Final conference

The ESF MO Forum on Peer Review organised an International Workshop and a European Workshop on 6 and 7 December 2011 as a closing event of the Forum which ended on 31 December 2011.

About the Forum

Background

All research funding organisations face the same challenge: assessing quality and potentialities of research proposals,  while working within their own specific context, programmes, and guidelines. The ESF Member Organisation Forum on Peer Review  addresses the EUROHORCs-ESF Road Map Action on Peer Review by attempting to define common pan-European quality criteria for peer review.

The Forum has developed “The European Peer Review Guide” which identifies five pillars for supporting and sharing good practices of peer review: core principles, quality assurance, process integrity, governance structure and methodology.  The Guide has been designed to address the assessment procedures of different funding instruments including large scale programmes such as Joint Programming.

The guide is based on a comprehensive survey, “The ESF Survey Analysis Report on Peer Review Practices”. This survey benchmarked and identified good practice amongst the many different systems and criteria currently in use in European countries. This includes research funding and performing organisations, councils, private foundations and charities, which all have roles in evaluating research applications.

Coordinated by the ESF, the Guide is the product of a joint effort between more than 30 national funding and performing organisations from 23 countries, the European Research Council (ERC), European Commission and Research Executive Agency (REA).

Aims

The ESF Member Organisation Forum on Peer Review has created an output-oriented network that debates, exchanges and promotes good practices across Europe.

 

Objectives

  • Exchange and document experiences with current practices

  • Identification of good practices

  • Working towards peer review coordination to enable benchmarking of national peer review processes.

  • Standardisation of peer review processes to make outcomes of nationally conducted peer review comparable.

  • International peer review and sharing of resources.

Strategic Alignment


Press coverage of the Peer Review Guide

28/04/11 RXPG News: Spending wisely: ESF publishes first international peer review guide for funding research

28/04/11 Medical News Today Spending wisely: ESF publishes first international peer review guide for funding research
 
28/04/11 Medilexicon Spending wisely: ESF publishes first international peer review guide for funding research

03/03/11 Research Europe Today ESF publishes peer review guidelines

04/05/11 Nature A how-to for peer review
 
The Nature article was tweeted by their news editor and re-tweeted 15 times eg.

 


For more information please contact mo-fora[at]esf.org