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All academics grumble at peer review, especially when times are hard.
Last year the now-defunct Science and Engineering Research Council allocated
its grants to only a fifth of the 4000 applicants in search of support.
The litany of complaints from those who failed to get a grant includes claims
of bias, victimisation, favouritism and elitism. But now the shiny new Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council, bolted together from bits of SERC
and other research councils, plans to tackle the thorny issue (see This
Week).

The idea is to speed things up, discourage mediocrity and give researchers
greater confidence in the judgment of their peers. A preliminary screening
exercise by three referees – including one selected by the applicant – before
the full-blooded review will cut out the dross. Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs will be free
to nominate their own peers as initial reviewers and those chosen will form
a ‘college’ from which final review panels will be drawn. Applicants who
are unsuccessful in the initial screening are to be told why.

To cut down on mediocre applications that waste time and taxpayers’
money, universities may be asked to publish their ‘hit rates’ – the proportion
of applications that are successful. The council will view more favourably
a university with one blockbuster application that is accepted than the
university that sends in 10 applications, half of which are rejected.

And industrialists are to get more say in the EPSRC’s research priorities.
A panel of 10 top industrialists will now have as much input into research
council policy as a separate panel of 10 scientists. The consultation exercise
leading to the government’s White Paper on science and technology revealed
that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Britain’s science base despite
the never-ending miserliness of the government. What was exposed was that
British industries – particularly physics-based firms – were poor at pulling
out good research findings from universities and putting them to commercial
ends. It will be interesting to see how closely the industrialists’ ‘wish
list’ of technologies matches the academic panel’s ‘catalogue of emerging
technologies’. The combination of the two will pass to peer review committees
to be published as policy.

But there are important questions to be asked. Will the new system result
in an elite of universities monopolising funds? Will the system suppress
the freedom for scientists to follow their instincts? And will scientists
lose their independence of thought? The plan deserves praise and proper
consideration – perhaps the same sort as a peer review committee might be
expected to give a new submission.