The head and chairman of the EPSRC faced robust questions from the House of Lords science and technology committee yesterday over the direction of the funding council’s roadmap for the physical sciences.

David Delpy, chief executive of the EPSRC, and John Armitt, chair of the council, were both quizzed by top scientists from the House the Lords over the council’s ‘shaping capability’ strategy, the inclusion of ‘national importance’ as a criterion in assessing grants and whether the EPSRC will be a funder or sponsor of research in the future.

The council’s plan to require grant applicants to articulate their research’s importance to the country over a 10-50 year timeframe came in for particularly close scrutiny. John Krebs, a top zoologist at Oxford University, pointed to a page on the EPSRC website that stated that national importance was going to be given the same weighting as research excellence. Delpy responded that this was in error and that research excellence was the primary critereon for funding research with national importance coming into play in the case of a tie break. Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, described efforts to try to predict research’s importance as an ‘entirely unrealistic requirement’. Delpy and Armitt defended national importance as something that the EPSRC has been requiring in grant applications in one form or another for some years. Armitt added that the council’s ‘transparency’ in spelling out its policy on the importance of research’s contribution to society had created a ‘rod for our own back’.

The council’s shaping capability strategy also came in for criticism. The strategy has proved controversial among some researchers, particularly in the chemistry community, for its emphasis on targeting funding to particular areas. Critics have claimed that the strategy makes a mockery of peer review and leaves EPSRC administrators in charge of the future direction of UK science. The committee asked whether the council’s shaping capability strategy and national importance criterion would strangle blue skies research. Delpy responded that peer review on grant panels would still spot new and exciting ideas as they come along.

Responding to questions about whether the EPSRC should be a funder or sponsor of research, Armitt said that the council’s role was to try to help the community set out a research agenda as it sees it. He added that in the past funding council’s had been seen as ‘fruit machines’ and that researchers kept going for another spin to see if they could hit the jackpot. He said that this could not continue and that the objective of setting an agenda for the research community was to get the ‘maximum bang for your buck’.

Patrick Walter

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?feed=rss2