STARTING in January, all scientists who receive grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will be asked to provide evidence that they have not wasted the council鈥檚 money. The EPSRC is planning scientific 鈥渁udits鈥� to check that its grant-holders have made good progress towards pre-defined research goals. 杏吧原创s who fail to make the grade will be put at the back of the queue when they next apply for funding.
Announcing the new arrangements, the EPSRC鈥檚 chairman Alan Rudge said last week that harsher sanctions may be on the way. The council may shut down projects that are going badly off course, he said.
Under the EPSRC鈥檚 present system, scientists are asked to fill in a report at the end of each grant, explaining what they have done with the money. This system, said Rudge, is inadequate: 鈥淭he quality of the final reports was very variable, from terrible to quite good.鈥�
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In future, when scientists apply to the EPSRC for funding they will have to include a one-page summary, outlining their research plan, and identifying the criteria by which they would like the outcome of their work to be judged. At the end of the project, its results will be compared with these criteria by scientists drawn from the same panels of reviewers used to select proposals for funding in the first place.
Rudge also signalled that he would like to move the audits forward, so they take place mid-way through each grant. EPSRC chief executive Richard Brook conceded that the plan 鈥渕ight be alarming for certain sections of the scientific community鈥�. But good researchers should have nothing to fear, argued Rudge.
Nevertheless, some researchers are worried that it will be difficult to identify clear goals for fundamental research. How, for example, can researchers working on high-temperature superconductors predict the advances they are likely to make? 鈥淣obody is going to object to evaluation,鈥� says John Mulvey of Save British Science. But the danger is that the audits may encourage scientists to submit conservative proposals and 鈥渄o research in which they already basically know the answers鈥�.
Rudge conceded that the criteria used to judge fundamental research will have to be more flexible than those for applied research, but it would not be exempt from the audits. 鈥淚 think even basic research has an objective,鈥� said Rudge.