Working papers

This paper argues that a holistic, system-wide approach is needed to relieve the growing strain on peer review across research funding, publishing, career advancement, and institutional evaluation. Drawing on expert interviews, it analyzes cross-domain themes like capacity and trust alongside shifting technological and geographical contexts to propose strategic pathways for systemic change.

This working paper offers a concise review of recent metascientific studies examining the bureaucratic burdens involved in preparing and assessing research funding applications across various national and organisational settings.

As demands intensify for research to address societal missions or challenges such as climate change, ageing or pandemic preparedness, research funders have developed funding instruments targeted at specific topics. We asked: does targeted funding shape the overall research landscape and what researchers work on in the longer term?

This paper presents a mixed-methods evaluation of an experiment with distributed peer review (DPR) carried out by the Volkswagen Foundation.

As part of the GRAIL project, a group of funders and researchers joined together to investigate the use of AI tools in grant giving practice.

This document reports three case studies giving examples from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), ‘la Caixa’ Foundation, and the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Previous research showed that researchers who obtain early-career funding are more likely to obtain later-career funding, whereas researchers who do not obtain early-career funding show a higher citation impact when reapplying for later-career funding.

We replicate the so-called Matthew effect and early-career setback effect across fourteen different funding programmes from six research funders across Europe and North America.

How are national systems for assessing publicly funded research evolving? What purposes do they serve and how are they designed to fulfil these? This working paper, which forms part of RoRI’s AGORRA project, surveys the landscape of national research assessment and funding systems across thirteen countries from 2010 to 2024, and makes three contributions to our understanding of these systems.

Research funders face unique pressures as they navigate AI everywhere. To address these challenges, the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) launched the GRAIL project (Getting Responsible about AI and machine Learning) in 2023 alongside an international consortium of funders. The project aims to provide fresh research evidence, practical guidelines, and resources to help funders responsibly design, use, and evaluate AI/ML tools within their funding and evaluation systems.

The UNDISCIPLINED project explored the importance of definitions and descriptions of transdisciplinary research (TDR).

This working paper comprises a review of selected literature on the intersection of funding and transdisciplinary research, and an analysis of ‘call for proposal’ documents across six funding programmes (seven calls) in three European research funding agencies.

We build on our earlier taxonomy of peer review practices in the publishing domain to map out the characteristics of peer review within funding organizations. We present the results of an analytical literature review according to this taxonomy; we conclude by considering possible points for synergies across domains where peer review takes place and pose next steps for future research.