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In a change that will cause mixed reactions, UK research funding proposals no longer need "impact" statements.
UK researchers will, however, benefit from no longer having to submit a "Pathways to Impact" plan or complete an "Impact Summary" when applying for cash from UKRI – the umbrella organization for the UK's seven research councils. The Pathways to Impact requirement, which had been in place for around a decade, was controversial. But for grant applications made from 1 March 2020, researchers will not have to submit. The UKRI currently invest a total of £7bn into British science each year
"The removal of 'Pathways to Impact' will be broadly welcomed by the many grant-writing physicists whose heart sank at the thought of churning out two pages of boilerplate on the ill-defined socioeconomic impact of their proposed research," says Physicist Philip Moriarty from the University of Nottingham. "Yet despite being a vocal opponent of it for many years, I feel it's important to recognise that it played a role in shifting attitudes regarding the broader implications of academic research. For one thing, the 'impact agenda' led to a greater – albeit, often rather opportunistic – interaction between science and the arts and humanities. Hopefully this interdisciplinary activity will continue in its absence".
The US National Science Foundation requires a "Broader Impacts" statement in its grant applications.
Grant proposals are generally a big time sink for scientists, and the "impact" statement seems like it needs the thickest helping of buzzwords, exaggerations, meaningless generalities, and unfounded optimism. But society legitimately wants to know what it's getting out of the research. Maybe cool results, publications, and productivity metrics are enough?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 02 2020, @07:27AM
I understand your point that outreach might not be the best use of time. Alternatively, scientists could be required to disseminate preprints and that peer-reviewed journal articles be published with immediate open access. I'm not altogether opposed to eliminating impact statements, but bloat needs to be reduced elsewhere. Some of the same fluff in impact statements also appears in proposal introductions. NSF's results from prior research section is probably redundant. Project timelines are often fictitious, but are required.
In my experience, peer review is rather arbitrary and I'm not convinced it leads to good decisions. In a conversation with an experienced researcher at NOAA's AOML, he described the NOAA review process as being somewhat random. He described submitting an LOI, being discouraged from submitting a full proposal, doing so anyway, and the proposal being funded.
In a recent experience with NOAA, one of my proposals just missed the cut for being funded. One of the reviewers stated that the proposal didn't adhere to the length and formatting requirements. In fact, the proposal was within the formatting requirements, so the reviewer's statement was provably false. I don't know if the deduction in the proposal scoring could have made the difference between being funded or not funded, but it was frustrating. There was no mechanism to request that NOAA reconsider the proposal, so I had to accept the incorrect review. In a different proposal, I described significant outreach in the equivalent of the broader impacts section. A reviewer didn't like that the outreach didn't include incorporating the research into classroom instruction at the university, and the reviewer deducted ~25% of the points for that criterion. Of course, I couldn't do what the reviewer wanted because I'm in a 100% research appointment with no opportunity to work my research into a curriculum.
I'm not opposed to eliminating impact statements except for projects that involve things like technology transfer. However, there's a lot of other fluff that needs to be eliminated as well. I don't enjoy writing NOAA proposals. Every year, I submit a couple of proposals to NOAA, and it seems each year there's some new fluff that's been added. It's stuff like identifying the readiness level of the research on a 1-9 scale, which seems a bit subjective, especially when different aspects of the project may be at different levels. Then there are things like defining metrics for project success, which seems to be a lot of fluff. Most recently, all proposals are required to include a statement on diversity and inclusion. Although I generally support diversity and inclusion, the statement ends up being a lot of fluff for a rather small applied research project.
I definitely support reducing the amount of work scientists have to do for writing proposals. It's one of the main reasons why I hate grant writing. However, I'm not at all convinced that impact statements are the biggest culprit.