Demand management - listening to your views
25 October 2011
Outcome of the ESRC's demand management consultation
The ESRC remains committed to working towards effective and transparent arrangements for managing the increasing demand for its research funding. Our aim is to fund the best research proposals from the social science community while reducing the number of applications which do not meet our required standards.
We are starting to do this with your help. In June 2011 we introduced changes to our existing peer review practices and submission policies, as well as self-regulation with the community taking the lead in quality assuring and regulating the number of applications submitted to us. Our expectation is that this combination of self regulation and changes to our policies and processes will reduce demand. We will continue with this approach until at least autumn 2012, when we will review progress.
To continue our learning we conducted an extensive consultation exercise over the spring and summer, collecting views on what further steps might be taken to manage demand. The consultation offered four main options - individual researcher sanctions, institutional sanctions, institutional quotas and charging for the submission of applications. We were encouraged with the time and effort that the community spent on providing comments on these options. We received a very positive response, including detailed comments from 44 institutions. These provided us with a valuable range of opinions from which to gauge the social science community’s views - see the list of institutional respondents (PDF, 65.8Kb). The overall response to the consultation was as follows:
| Number of respondents | Researcher sanctions | Institutional quotas | Institutional sanctions | Charging | None of the proposed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Individuals | 25 | 44% | 20% | 4% | 0% | 32% |
| Institutions | 44 | 82% | 9% | 11% | 5% | 0% |
| Learned Society and other agencies | 5 | 80% | 0% | 0% | 20% | 0% |
| All Respondents | 74 | 68% | 12% | 9% | 3% | 11% |
Some respondents gave alternatives with no clear single preference, consequently the percentages in each do not necessarily total 100 per cent.
Respondents supported our desire to avoid the need to take further steps. However, if these were needed, the vast majority of respondents judged that the fairest method would be to limit for a certain length of time the applications from researchers who consistently fail to meet our required standards. Given this clear message, it is likely that any further steps will reflect these views.
We remain confident that by working in partnership with HEIs there will be no need to take further steps. There has been a very positive response from institutions to our call for greater self-regulation, and we expect that this will lead to a reduction in uncompetitive proposals.
The following link gives the full information published in March 2011 on demand management, including details on the consultation:
