Researchers’ Distrust in Grant Peer Review – Reasons and Remedies

Research funding agencies play a key role in the governance of public research. Universities rely on their funding to cover research projects and to pay temporary, and sometimes also permanent, staff. The funding agencies, on their part, rely on peer reviewers in assessing the projects to fund. Thus, the steering of public funding for research is regulated with peer review as a buffer – or mediator – between politics and science. While the role of peers in grant review is perceived a cornerstone in the autonomy and self-governances of science, we see that researchers complain about how their research projects are assessed by funding agencies and often display distrust in their review procedures. With increased external funding comes an increased reliance on grant peer review, but we also see a system under pressure. Funding agencies often need to handle higher numbers of proposals within flat budgets while the grant applicants face low success rates and are critical to review systems, and the trust in the system seems to be weakening. Researchers complain that the evaluations of their proposals are biased, favouring specific research topics and methods or review outcome appears random, and also decided by luck. Meanwhile, success in prior grant competitions appear to increase possibilities for success in future grant competitions, as well as being crucial for research careers. Grant peer review has thus become a more important part of the research system. In this paper we will explore the conditions under which researchers have confidence in assessments of their research and trust grant review. May trust in grant review be kept in a system with low success rates and reviewer fatigue? Trust is called the glue of society – it keeps us together and makes things run more smoothly and flexibly. It is also a key component for a resilient research system. Trust in science seems generally based on the sources’ expertise, integrity and benevolence (Hendrics et al 2016). For trust in peer review, previous research points to competence – as defined by the reviewed – as the important factor (Hattke et al. 2018). In the paper we draw on a rich survey material on researchers’ views on who has the ability to evaluate the quality of their research. The data covers researchers in three fields in five countries (economics, cardiologist and physicist in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) and is coupled with bibliometric data. The data indicates that researchers’ trust in the competences of grant reviewers is far lower than their trust in the competences used for reviewing papers submitted to journals, or their colleagues’ ability to assess their research. Hattke, F., Bögner, I. & Vogel, R. (2018) (Why) Do you trust your reviewers? Influence behaviors, trustworthiness, and commitment to peer review. Managementforschung 28:61–86. 2 Hendriks, F., Kienhues, D., & Bromme, R. (2016). Trust in science and the science of trust. In B. Blöbaum (Ed.), Trust and communication in a digitized world: Models and concepts of trust research (pp. 143–159). Springer International Publishing.