Sponsor
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
For More Information
Please visit the CIHR website for further information about the Project Grant competition
Description
The application process to submit to the 2016 Project Grant Pilot competition closed on March 1. In this competition, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) received over 4,300 registrations and can now confirm receipt of approximately 3,820 full applications.
Over the coming weeks and months CIHR will work collaboratively with an expert, qualified cadre of approximately 140 Competition Chairs (Virtual Chairs) to enable assignment of high quality peer reviewers for all applications within this large competition. Already, over 1,800 expert reviewers, most of whom have reviewed for CIHR in the past, have accepted to act as reviewers. To date, only those individuals who did not intend to submit an application to the 2016 Project Grant Pilot competition have been accepted. With the full applications now received, areas with gaps in expertise for review have been identified. In keeping with the primary objective of enabling high quality review, as well as with international and past CIHR peer review practices, some Principal Applicants in the competition will be approached to review applications in areas of expertise where their help is deemed essential.
It should be noted that CIHR has routinely used applicants as reviewers within the same competition in the past, so long as they did not participate in the committee reviewing their own application. In the 2016 Project Grant Pilot competition there is no opportunity for applicants to influence the ranking of their own applications as they have no access to or overlap with those reviewers assigned to rank their own application. Further, to mitigate against any potential bias (real or perceived) at the competition level, all reviewers will have to declare any potential conflicts before any review, all reviewers will be monitored by a virtual chair (who will be made aware of the status of the reviewer as an applicant), and all individual reviews will be open for challenge by other reviewers assigned to a given application through on-line discussion.
Regular updates on progress of the 2016 Project Grant Pilot competition will be provided as the competition steps proceed.