ASTRONOMY GRANTS PANEL 2011

Report by Chairman to Community

This is a short informal report on behalf of AGP panel members - official
news and definitive statements will come from STFC, and if you have
questions about your own application, you should approach the office
rather than panel members. But hopefully this report will give you an
idea of what has been going on and what is coming up. Here are some key
points :

* Those well above and below the line will be informally contacted very
soon, with formal award announcements following over the next few weeks

* The next deadline has been confirmed as Feb 16th 2012

* New grants will be issued as 3 yr grants with an option of no-cost
extension of up to a year

* The budget is roughly the same as last year, but a small extra bonus
from the Wakeham efficiency review

THE NEW SCHEME

As you will be aware unless you have been in your hermit's cave for the
last year, we have been implementing the new consolidated grants scheme.
In some ways this is like the old rolling grant scheme. ("This is your
one big chance, every three years.") But in a crucial sense its more like
the standard grants scheme - applications are expected to be divided into
discrete projects which can be graded independently, so that we produce a
ranked list of projects, not a ranked list of grants. Some applicants
choose to stress the synergistic nature of their work, and this can help
make each project feel better, but it is not required. An important
implication is that there is no "free floating" investigator FEC time.
Investigator time therefore has to be either justified within the context
of a specific programme of work that includes responsibilities for both
an RA and the investigator(s), or justified within a "investigator time
only" request. We took the attitude that the latter had to be justified
on the basis of a *specific* science case, rather than "X is doing jolly
good work in general".

Following PPAN request, we also reduced the typical level of investigator
time per RA too be more in line with other areas of STFC peer review. We
also ceased the previous practice of visiting presentations for rolling
grants, as this was implausible for the increased total number of groups
under consideration. Instead we added an extra feedback round of
"assessor's questions", which seems to have been popular. Finally, we
note that the new scheme allows for consortium grants, and for
out-of-cycle New Applicant grants. We received examples of both this
round, so these schemes do seem to be meeting a need.

THE 2011 GRANTS REVIEW

This was a very heavy round. We received 35 applications, 18 of which
were from groups who previously held standard grants. Almost all such
groups, given the choice of when to consolidate, chose this round. Six
applications were bridging requests, pending a further merger expected
with another group next year or the year after. We had 4 consortium
applications, and 2 New Applicant proposals. (Another two have been
received since.). These 35 applications contained 261 distinct projects,
including 227 RA posts, and requesting a total of GBP82M, roughly a factor
of three more than STFC could afford. Some of this however is in existing
commitment to standard grants, so the effective overbidding was something
like a factor 2.5. The range of overbidding compared to existing baseline
was considerable, from 1.2 to a factor 4.5. We certainly hope this calms
down in future rounds.

We allocated projects to one or more of the sub-panels - Astronomy
Observation (AO), Astronomy Theory (AT), Solar Science (SS), and
Planetary Science (PL).

As in previous years, every application had multiple referee reports, and
an assessor (now known, following RCUK policy, as the "Introducer"), who
writes an initial report before our panel meetings, and this year also
sent applicants additional "Assessor's Questions". The sub-panels then
met in two sessions - AO/AT together, then SS/PL together - lasting a
total of 5 days. (The AGP chair and deputy chair attended all the
meetings.) Before the meetings, all sub-panel members provided initial
scores, but only the chairs saw these. At the meetings, each project was
discussed in turn, and then given a final score and ranking around the
table. As you might expect, when it became obvious that a project was
near the bottom or near the top, discussion was accelerated, so that we
could spend most of the time near the middle.

A subset of the AGP then met as the "merging panel" for a further two
days. Selected projects were cross-read by members from the "other side"
in order to agree matching points in the ranked lists. This process
resulted in a small but definite re-scaling.

The final output was a ranked ordering of projects, which STFC could work
down through once they knew their budget situation. To help us arrive at
that ranked list we used, as in previous years, a scoring system based on
the categories mandated STFC-wide, and explained in the official
guidelines, but using our own weightings. Each category was scored 0-5,
with each possible score defined by a standard wording such as
"Competitive with the best science funded worldwide". This temporary
scoring system is only used for internal discussion; the actual result is
an agreed ranking order for projects.

It is important to realise that we judged investigator time only cases on
exactly the same basis as RA cases - is the science excellent? is it
clear what the investigator will actually do?

BUDGET and FINANCE ISSUES

Results are being announced a little later than we hoped, although
nowhere near as late as last year. The delay is partly because of
difficulties encountered in calculating the financial consequences of our
recommendations, and so being able to draw a clear line. The new
RCUK-wide grants system simply does not provide for the re-calculation of
awards. STFC's practice is to make reduced awards in order to assure the
most effective use of our resources. This involves quite complicated
calculations which now need to be done manually. Because of this, getting
to a reliable estimate of the cost of the AGP's recommendations has taken
huge efforts by the office, and inevitably, more time to derive.

The second reason for delay was an uncertainty in the budget available.
Following cuts in two successive rounds, there was no further cut this
year, so we had a pretty firm idea of how much we might be able to
recommend. However, following the Wakeham "efficiency review" RCUK has
been in discussion with the Universities over the indirect costs which
have been applied in the recent past under the FEC scheme, and as a
result, some funds have been returned to RCUK. Somewhat to our pleasant
surprise, some of this filtered through to the AGP budget. We realise
that our university administrators may have a somewhat different
perspective on this, but the result is that we could recommend the award
of slightly more positions than we otherwise would have been able to.

RESULTS

In total STFC is able to fund 77 RA posts and 9 Technician posts. Note
that these numbers are average FTEs over the three years; also these
numbers include 34.25 staff years for the positions connected with
existing standard grants which are "reconfirmed". The profile is then a
little more complicated than previous years, but for approximate
comparison with previous years, we are funding ~76 new RA+Tech posts -
more than last year but rather less than three years ago. We also
recommended 22 FTEs of investigator time, including 18 projects where we
recommended the award of only investigator time. Some of these were cases
where only investigator time was requested; in other cases, the science
was rated highly but we were not convinced by the case for an RA.
Conversely, there were cases where an RA was recommended, but only some
of the requested investigator time - as emphasised above, the AGP looked
for explicit and specific justification of investigator time.

Because of folding in existing standards, and the bridging requests, the
statistics are a little hard to compare with previous years, but roughly
speaking we were able to recommend funding around a third of the request.
This is crudely uniform across science areas, across geographical areas,
and across group size. However, it is clearly the case that small groups
can suffer the most from the loss of one or two RAs - to one or zero, for
example. As last year, STFC cannot fund all projects which were scored
as being competitive with the best in the world (what we referred to last
year as the "Cable Test"), but because of the last minute extra "Wakeham"
money, it gets a little closer. STFC's Science Board have been made aware
of this situation, that we cannot even fund all our world class science.

Our original intention was that grants be awarded with three years worth
of money, but with a four year duration from start date to end date, to
allow some extra flexibility to grant holders, and this is how applicants
completed their JES forms. However, for technical reasons we won't bore
you with, this produces extra complication for both the current awards
and for future grants rounds. We are recommending that grants be
announced as three year grants, but applicants should be aware that at
any stage after the grant has started they can request a no-cost
extension of up to a year, which still produces the originally intended
flexibility.

NEXT ROUND

The AGP's intention is to make minimal change to the next round, while
the new scheme is continuing to bed in. However we are using an earlier
submission date than for 2011 (Feb 16th), and will try to make
announcements as early as we can. There are some minor changes in
detailed rules, which will be explained in revised guidelines coming out
very soon.

FEC ISSUE

We are keenly aware that given the limited amount of funding,
considerable numbers of excellent university scientists will find
themselves having neither an RA nor funded "FEC" time. This means for
example that FEC funding should certainly not be seen as a badge of
whether or not one is "research active", let alone being a kind of
substitute for QR. We are also keenly aware that a number of groups are
left having very little STFC support. These thoughts lead to a number of
strategic and policy issues that are of course beyond the remit of the
AGP, but you should know that we have at least brought these issues to
the attention of STFC Science Board.

Andy Lawrence

Edinburgh Dec 5th 2011