Professor Steve Wessling

There are a lot of inaccuracies in that editorial.

Firstly, one of the things that we've done with Abcentric Peer Review is actually dramatically improve the alignment of the expertise of the peer reviewer with the grant.

So prior to our Abcentric Peer Review,

where we have five independent reviewers for every grant, about 27% of people said, yes, they were assigned on that panel to an appropriate grant.

Yeah, absolutely.

And one of the issues around the panels was also conflicts of interest.

So lots of people had to leave the room because they were conflicted because the grant was coming from their university or something like that.

But now we have 90% alignment of the expertise with the grant.

And that's from the people who are doing the reviewing.

They're saying, I got the right grants to review 90% of the time.

So that is really important.

The other bit of information that we had looked at across the years was the impact of the panel on the final score or the decision to fund or not fund.

Yes, yes.

So we'd have a primary spokesperson and a secondary spokesperson.

So two people on the panel would talk to the grant.

Once those two people had spoken and given their scores, the panel very, very rarely changed the scores or changed the fundable outcome.

So this concept that panels were having in-depth conversations and changing scores and changing funding was not consistent with the data that we had.

The next point that I'd like to make is that people talk about transparency, fairness and accountability, and they are really important points to us.

And we now, with our five allocated reviewers, those five allocated reviewers to an individual grant,

see each other's scores, they see each other's comments, and they see each other's identity.