Points of Interest for Funding Bodies

The ANEP receives evaluation requests from a wide range of bodies and institutions wishing to fund activities of whatever kind relating to R&D and innovation. Annually, it receives more than 20,000 evaluation requests. For this reason it is important that applications sent to it meet certain conditions. This is so they can be processed more easily and so enable us to provide a high quality evaluation.

Some of the points of interest for organisations and institutions requesting proposal evaluation by the ANEP are set out below:

DOCUMENTS

Before sending the proposal a representative of the organisation should contact the ANEP's management to inform it of the type of applications, their quantity, the envisaged calendar, etc.
Once a collaboration has been established, organisations should send the ANEP a database with the basic minimum information on each application (name and address of the lead researcher, title of the project, centre, organisation and ANEP area into which the project is classified). Applications should preferably be sent in electronic form, in a format compatible with the ANEP's evaluation application software. There are constraints on the handling of requests received in paper format or in an electronic format incompatible with the ANEP's evaluation application. This can result in delays or make it necessary to choose an evaluation method that is not that which is optimal for the type of action being evaluated.

TIME TAKEN

A research project (considered in isolation) can normally be evaluated in 20-25 days. However, the evaluation of the set of projects submitted to a call for proposals entails a large number of requests, resulting in the total evaluation time being extended to between 8 and 10 weeks, approximately. For new calls for proposals, however, a maximum time of 3 months is envisaged.

LANGUAGE

As stated in the section on the Evaluation Process, the evaluators are selected on the basis of their experience and knowledge of the topic, independently from where they live (experts resident in other countries may participate). At the same time, we try to avoid using evaluators who are located geographically nearby, may have conflicts of interest, belong to the same department, or work with the applicants. To meet these requirements, project proposals submitted to the ANEP for evaluation should preferably be written in Spanish, and in some cases in English. Evaluating applications in other languages restricts the choice of experts, which may have an impact on the quality and impartiality of the process.

REPORT FORMATS AND EVALUTION CRITERIA

The evaluation criteria are laid down by the rules published in the Ministerial Order (or each organisation's resolutions) announcing the call for proposals. The ANEP is normally consulted about the evaluation criteria so as to agree on a form. The ANEP guarantees that the criteria applied during the evaluation process fully match those published.

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Contact

E-mail address: info.anep@mec.es