A How-to for Peer Review
A How-to for Peer Review from Nature News Your cross-disciplinary grant application has been rejected. Do you wonder if specialist reviewers really grasped its scope? Would you feel more, or less, confident in the process if reviewers were paid? A report from the European Science Foundation (ESF) offers guidance on the fairest ways to evaluate project proposals. The European Peer Review Guide, out last week, maps grant-reviewing practices among European funding agencies and sets out recommendations. Europe is a kind of laboratory for peer review, with programmes that span disciplines, and countries with varying evaluation criteria, review procedures and incentives for reviewers. There is no single correct model, says co-author Marc Heppener, the ESF’s director of science and strategy development. “The report refrains from using the term ‘best practice’, and refers instead to ‘good practice’,” he says. http://ow.ly/4NO2n “Science in the News” is produced daily by Sigma Xi as a service for its members and the public. It highlights science and technology news stories appearing in the mainstream media. The accompanying Web links provide access to the full text of the articles on the Web sites of the individual media outlets from which they are taken. For more about the service, visit American Scientist Online
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