@article{a0978a8c08ff4e2081fc194bcba8ec74,
title = "Peer review and the ex ante assessment of societal impacts",
abstract = "Funding agencies and research councils around the world rely on peer review to assess the potential impacts of proposed research. This article compares the procedures of two major public science agencies - the US National Science Foundation and the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme - for evaluating ex ante the potential societal impact of research proposals. In this paper we survey the state of the art and discuss some of the conceptual questions that arise in using ex ante peer review to assess the societal impact of scientific research.",
author = "{Britt Holbrook}, J. and Robert Frodeman",
note = "Funding Information: NSF is the US federal agency that supports basic research across all fields of science and engineering (with the exception of medical research, which is supported in the US by the National Institutes of Health). With an annual budget of more than $7 billion, NSF is the funding source for approximately 20% of all federally supported basic research conducted by US colleges and universities. Over 95% of the funding proposals submitted to NSF (now routinely over 40,000 annually) undergo the process of what NSF terms {\textquoteleft}merit review{\textquoteright} rather than {\textquoteleft}peer review{\textquoteright} — this to indicate that review by peers is merely part of the larger funding decision-making process, which also includes NSF staff. In other words, at NSF, peer reviewers do not make funding decisions. Funding Information: Funding agencies and research councils around the world rely on peer review to assess the potential impacts of proposed research. This article compares the procedures of two major public science agencies — the US National Science Foundation and the European Commission{\textquoteright}s 7th Framework Programme — for evaluating ex ante the potential societal impact of research proposals. In this paper we survey the state of the art and discuss some of the conceptual questions that arise in using ex ante peer review to assess the societal impact of scientific research. Funding Information: The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for this research provided by the US National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0830387. The authors also wish to express their appreciation to NSF and EC officials who contributed to this research, while emphasizing that any opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF or the EC. The authors also thank Brunel{\textquoteright}s Health Economics Research Group for hosting the international two-day workshop on {\textquoteleft}State of the Art in Assessing Research Impact{\textquoteright} and for including our presentation in the workshop. Comments received during the workshop were very helpful in formulating this paper. Special thanks are due Claire Donovan for inviting us to participate in the workshop and to Martin Buxton for his insightful criticisms. Finally, the authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Funding Information: The EC appoints roughly 10,000 independent expert reviewers per year and receives over 16,000 proposals annually. The peer review process itself consists of multiple steps. Minimally, proposals undergo review first by individual reviewers acting independently. This is followed by a consensus discussion, which takes place at the Covent Garden facility in Brussels, of those same experts (the ERC follows a different procedure). Finally, a panel of reviewers establishes a priority order for funding. Within the constraints of budget, the EC follows the advice of the peer reviewers, who thereby essentially make funding decisions. Funding Information: We pose this question via an examination of two prominent public science agencies, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the European Commission (EC) 7th Framework Programme (FP7). In doing so we draw on research from our NSF-funded project, the Comparative Assessment of Peer Review (CAPR). CAPR is a four-year project (2008– 2012) that examines the changing nature of the peer review processes across six public science agencies, three US, two European, and one Canadian, with a particular focus on how these agencies integrate broader societal impacts issues into the review of grant proposals.1",
year = "2011",
month = sep,
doi = "10.3152/095820211X12941371876788",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "20",
pages = "239--246",
journal = "Research Evaluation",
issn = "0958-2029",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
number = "3",
}