Eastern Arc Peer Review System
Eastern Arc provides the opportunity for applicants to get informal feedback from those outside of their own institution. This has two significant benefits:
- It can provide more objective feedback, as the reviewer will not have a relationship with or knowledge about the applicant;
- It can provide more discipline-specific insights, if an applicant is working in a discipline that is small or isolated within a single university, or where specific disciplinary expertise for review is internally lacking.
As with the Eastern Arc Mentoring Scheme, the Peer Review System is intended to be simple, unbureaucratic, and to complement rather than replace those structures of support that already exist at each university.
The scheme will initially be run on a pilot basis, and be limited to the sciences and humanities. We will monitor the workload and effectiveness of the scheme, and decide on its future development in 2025/26.
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Initially, an applicant will receive help, support and feedback within their own school or university from a mentor, research development professional, or peer reviewer.
If either the applicant or any of those supporting them feel that would benefit from further insight or feedback, they can contact their associate dean for research (or equivalent).
The ADR will talk to their counterparts at the other three universities to identify someone with the necessary funder experience and disciplinary knowledge, as well as the capacity, to help them. This will not always be the case, and if so the process will stop at this point.
If someone is available with the appropriate background and capacity, they will either:
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- Be sent the outline application, to provide comments. These can be given anonymously.
- Be introduced to each other for informal mentoring focussed on developing the application.
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The EARC peer review system has five key principles:
- It is primarily intended to be used on large applications (over £200k) but will allow for some flexibility dependent on need and capacity.
- It will be optional, and only used with the consent of the applicant
- It will be unbureaucratic.
- It will complement but not replace existing peer review processes at each university.
- It will be confidential, and both the application and any comments will not be shared beyond the applicant and reviewer.
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The Director of EARC will keep a record of those who have taken part in the scheme, to ensure that no single academic has been overburdened with requests to take part.