Part of the Wellcome’s Institutional Strategic Support Fund award to the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute has been used to identify ways to create greater openness and transparency for applicants to funding opportunities, and to explore concrete ways by which equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) can be improved in accessing these opportunities for researchers at all levels.

Professor Ian Penton-Voak, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, School of Psychological Science, lead the initiative and looked at various way of addressing these issues.

Professor Penton-Voak worked with the Division of Research, Enterprise and Innovation (DREI), University of Bristol, on a new system for dissemination of research opportunities. The new Pivot-RP system has the ability to fingerprint/profile academics from ORCID profiles, other publicly available material and information provided by the researchers themselves. Pivot can then send curated grant opportunities directly to researchers, who can then flag calls they are interested in. These flags are visible to selected others who can then facilitate team building.

The third strand of work is a collaboration with the MoreBrains Co-operative – a group of experts in research ecosystems - to map pre-award processes, investigating factors that support or hinder researchers seeking funding (either as principal or co-investigators) through a series of workshops, webinars and a symposium.

In January 2023, the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research at the University of Bristol, in collaboration with the MoreBrains Cooperative, organised a symposium of researchers to analyse how pre-award processes can present obstacles to researchers and unintentionally reinforce biases like the Matthew effect, in which resources flow to those who have them. The findings from this symposium, and from subsequent discussions with research funders, resulted in a report with general recommendations on how the scholarly community can support transparency and equality*, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in pre-award processes.

DORA’s Asia-Pacific (A-P) and Africa, Americas, Europe (AAE) funder discussion groups were created in 2020 to support communication between funding organisations about research assessment reform, and to accelerate the development of new policies and practices that lead to positive changes in research culture.

During their September 2022 meetings, these groups participated in a mapping exercise to identify existing research assessment interventions and areas to align on for future work. One of the key themes that emerged from this exercise was the importance of considering all steps in the funding process as part of responsible research assessment. This included the processes that take place before research is submitted for funding (pre-award processes), such as the timing of proposal calls and deadlines, transparency and guidance, phrasing and language use, selection and training of reviewers, and planning for “evaluating the evaluators” or “evaluating the evaluation process”.

A natural next step for this report was to identify which recommendations were most practically applicable. Given the interest of the DORA research funders discussion groups in this topic, DORA partnered with Elizabeth Blackwell Institute and MoreBrains to identify which of the report recommendations were most actionable for research funders to undertake. In September and October 2023, DORA, Elizabeth Blackwell Institute, and MoreBrains organised a set of parallel symposia and workshops for each funder discussion group. The groups used the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute report recommendations as a tool to develop and prioritise areas for intervention. Read more about the plans for improving pre-award processes for equitable and transparent research assessment.

Defining good practice in the pre-award area will require ongoing analysis of existing workflows and procedures to locate any filtration points, ‘gatekeepers’, or any other barriers to funding other than the rigour or quality of an applicant’s ideas. Further workshops are planned with MoreBrains and DORA in the summer of 2024. We will seek to develop a better understanding of which groups are disadvantaged at any given stage and how those effects play out.

Our goals are to deepen the shared understanding of how mechanisms of exclusion currently operate through the pre-award process, highlight good practice in tackling these issues where it is available, and to propose new concrete actions that should be taken to improve EDI.