From 1st November 2009, the Council’s current requirement for a 5000 word End of Award Report three months after the end date of its award will be replaced. The new arrangements are designed to capture more evidence of scientific and practical (I.e. economic, social or policy) impacts while also being more economical in terms of its demand on award-holders’ time. The evidence collected by the new system will be used both to evaluate ESRC research and to support the funding case for social science by demonstrating even more clearly the academic and, where appropriate, practical impact of the work that the Council supports.

There are two steps to the new system. First, award-holders submit a much shorter End of Award Report three months after the end date of the project to provide the administrative details required by the ESRC for financial sign-off. Then, twelve months after the end of the project award-holders submit an Impact Report to provide concise details of outputs and impacts (both scientific and practical) to date. The new End of Award Report report, as with the current version, requires an electronic signature from your institution’s Finance Officer or equivalent representative. The Impact Report does not require an institutional validation.

It is important to emphasise that the ESRC does not expect all of the projects it funds to achieve practical impacts. Award-holders who report only scientific contributions will not be disadvantaged in any way in the Council’s evaluation process. It will be possible to achieve the highest evaluation grades for scientific and/or practical impacts.

The extended reporting period will allow more time for outputs and impacts to emerge before the Council’s evaluation. The evaluation will now start twelve months after the end date of awards rather than three months as at present. There is also a facility for award-holders to update their project record with details of impacts that emerge beyond the time of the evaluation, and this extra information will be available to ESRC Committees when assessing future funding applications.

All ESRC award-holders who are affected by these changes will be contacted directly by the Council. The new report templates can be downloaded either from award-holders’ grant pages on the ESRC Society Today web site or from:

www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/finalreporting

The next workshop will take place on Wednesday 18 November 2009 at the Wellcome Trust, London, from 10.30-17.00.

The workshops will provide further information on the Engaging Science grant schemes (People, Arts, Society and Broadcast Development Awards), including an overview of the grants programme, the aims and objectives of the awards, and details of the application and review process.

Highlights

• How to produce an appropriate grant application
• Exchange ideas and develop partnerships and collaborations
• The chance to meet previous and existing grantholders and hear their experiences, from the application process right through to running and completing a successful project
• Individual grant surgeries with Wellcome Trust staff from each of the Engaging Science grants schemes
• A session on how to get suitable scientific input into your project.

The workshops are free to attend, however places are limited. For more details and to reserve a place please see the website:

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/Public-engagement/WTX039015.htm

• BBSRC – International Workshops
• EU: Study on the cooperation between higher education institutions and public and private organisations in Europe

You’ll find this at the bottom of the Document Menu in any bid you’re working on in Je-S, just above the “Back to document list” link as shown above. Clicking Document Preview will bring up a non-editable version of the application form as it appears when printed out. This helps to get an overall view of how the final bid will look to a reviewer.

You can achieve roughly the same effect by clicking “Create Document for Printing” on the right hand side of the Document Menu, under “Document Import/Export”, but Document Preview is a more straightforward one-click solution.

The programme evaluates public health interventions, providing new knowledge on the benefits, costs, acceptability and wider impacts of non-NHS interventions intended to improve the health of the public and reduce inequalities in health. The scope of the programme will be multi-disciplinary and broad.

The main focus of the Public Health Research (PHR) programme’s evaluation of public health interventions will be on effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. However, broader impact, as well as acceptability to the target community and wider society, are also important to the impact and sustainability of public health programmes, and, where relevant, will also be investigated.

Applications to the PHR programme will include both primary research and evidence synthesis. The precise methods will need to be appropriate to the question being asked and the feasibility of the research, but we expect the primary research to include RCTs, natural experiments, cohort studies, registry/database studies and qualitative methods.

Please contact us if you are a University of Lincoln researcher interested in this call.

• What do older people with high support needs want and value from life? Involving older people in shaping ‘A Better Life’ | Joseph Rowntree Foundation
• EPSRC: The Collaboration Fund

Despite drawing the definition of ‘impact’ very widely, to include economic, social, public policy, cultural and quality of life impacts, aspects of the proposals need to be rethought. As they stand at present, the historian that does good but not extraordinary work on Henry VIII could be valued more highly, if he presents a television series on the subject, than his colleague who spends 17 years producing a book that changes the way that historians see their subject, but which does not have wider impact beyond the academic community.

The critique also argues that, while the overall shift towards citation-informed peer review in the REF is welcome, the proposal to use citation information at the level of the individual output should be dropped. HEFCE’s reduction of the number of Units of Assessment from 66 to 30 is also singled out: HEPI argues that this may reduce burden and workload but at the expense of compromising academic integrity of the exercise.

• ESRC – Subjective Wellbeing and Public Policy
• ERRIN / EVENTS CALENDAR / Healthy Ageing-Research and Innovation Challenges
• RESEARCH – Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Information Day

• RCUK: Travel Funding for Early Career Researchers
• UK Grant Making Trusts

The University of Lincoln Repository is an online archive capable of hosting the full text of peer-reviewed, published research carried out by academic staff at the University. Through the Repository your research can be made available to a world-wide community of scholars and the general public. Materials in the Repository are indexed by specialised repository search engines, and they are also given higher rankings by popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This makes your papers easier to find and increases the profile of your research, something which is increasingly important in the run up to the Research Excellence Framework in 2012/13.

The current journal-based model of publishing can make it difficult for other researchers to access your work – this can blunt the impact of your work, because if other researchers can’t see your work they can’t cite it. Publisher policies on repositories differ, but most allow authors to deposit a version of their work in an institutional or subject-specific repository. Checking publisher policies is part of the upload process, and can be done simply by searching for a specific publisher or journal in an online database. Even if you are unable to make the full text available, due to publisher restrictions, the repository will still publish the bibliographic details of the work to search engines, thus raising your profile.

Open Access institutional repositories are being developed by universities across the world: there are now over 100 in the UK and over 1000 worldwide according to opendoar.org, the online directory of open access repositories. The growth in repositories has been accelerated by the fact that most major research funders (including the UK Research Councils and the EC) now require the deposit of any work resulting from funding in an Open Access repository. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) further encouraged this trend by investing £14M in UK institutional repositories between 2006 and 2009. The University of Lincoln Repository was established thanks to JISC funding, and was used extensively in the run up to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise to catalogue and validate the submissions.

In addition to research outputs, the Repository can also store teaching materials that are being used within the University.  Storing teaching and learning materials in a repository makes them searchable and shareable, and promotes the personal, departmental and institutional work of the University.

To find out more about the University of Lincoln Repository, or to deposit a research paper or teaching object, go to http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk and follow the on-screen guidance. You could also attend one of the monthly training sessions being run by the Research Office, CERD and the Library.

Travel Funding for Early Career Researchers

Summary:
The Research Councils UK (RCUK) Office in India wants to create opportunities for early career researchers to visit India as part of broader UK-India networking activity.  Subject to a successful application, the office will provide limited funds to support a single trip to India for early career researchers to attend a workshop or other similar event in India.  These funds are specifically to enable UK based, early career researchers, to accompany Research Council supported researchers centrally involved in organising or planning an event in India.

Costs – what the funding will cover:

• Indian visa – if required
• reasonably priced return flight
• stay in hotel or other suitably priced accommodation & meals – for the duration of the event only
• meals – for the duration of the event and event related travelling time only
• transport to/ from airport in UK and India