How to design inclusive research funding schemes

Research isn’t always a level playing field. More men than women become researchers and they are more likely to progress to senior positions. A few top research organisations and universities get significantly more funding than most of the others. Some countries and regions significantly outperform others in research activity.

This lack of equity has been an issue across the EU’s research programmes and persists in Horizon Europe. But there have been long running attempts to design inclusive research instruments that open doors for all types of researchers. This is what COST, the European Cooperation in Science and Technology, has been doing for the last 50 years.

COST is a networking scheme for researchers that acts as a ‘portal’ to other funding instruments, such as the €95.5 billion Horizon Europe research programme, in which COST is rooted. It helps researchers who may otherwise be overlooked, or who do not have the right connections and experience, to get a foot in the door.

From the start it was designed to be an open platform, very different to the usual EU research project. It runs so-called ‘Actions’, which are essentially networking projects in different fields of research. A group of researchers has to submit a proposal for an Action in their field of study, explaining why connecting with others working on the topic would be good for science. Here is a Science|Business explainer on how it works.

It has been successful: more than 40% of scientists involved in COST Actions are young researchers, 52% of COST Action leadership positions are held by women researchers and 49% of those involved in COST activities overall are women. More than half of COST funding goes to the Widening countries, which tend to underperform in other parts of Horizon Europe.

Bart Veys, head of policy at COST, explains why and how the programme is curated to ensure all types of researchers get in on the action.

Could you explain a little bit of history? Was it by design that COST became an inclusivity-conscious funder?

It’s hard to say. It was not by design from the start. COST has been around for 50 years, but the main reason why we are as inclusive is because we are a very open platform. The usual Horizon project has a consortium that applies and executes. In COST, it’s different. There’s a minimum number of proposers that apply to an Action, but then the Actions are open for other researchers to join. Researchers can apply to an Action, their application is assessed and then the Action expands.

We see high barriers applying for Horizon. Applying for grants is very labour intensive and money intensive as well, as it is often done by a consultancy, for which you pay big amounts to get even bigger amounts in funding. These kinds of methods of working are not always accessible for smaller universities and universities located in less research-intensive countries. They don’t have research management offices, where every faculty has an adviser for European grants, as is the case in Germany, the Netherlands and so on. But that doesn’t hinder our researchers in participating in Actions, because they don’t have to go through this proposal stage, and they can join an Action that is already funded.

We make it as inclusive as possible, because of this openness. We talk about ‘inclusive excellence’ – that’s one of our main tag lines now. Our evaluation process is mainly based on excellence, with of course very strict evaluation criteria. This resonated with the European Commission and since Horizon 2020, we have been half-funded through [Horizon Europe’s] Widening pillar. So, the inclusiveness was not part of the building blocks of COST but now it’s clearly in our DNA, because of the nature of how we evaluated and run the programme.

How do you ensure geographical balance in the Actions?

I think more than half of our funding goes to researchers who are affiliated with Widening countries. The only rule we have is that at the application stage, 50% of the proposers – people who are affiliated with a legal entity in Europe – that entity needs to be based in a Widening country, we call them Inclusiveness Target Countries. These are the Widening countries plus non-EU countries, like the Western Balkans and Ukraine. Here, we don’t look at nationality but at the affiliation to the institution in a Widening country. If you have 10 proposers, five of them have to come from a Widening country.

Do the participants in different parts of Europe have any trouble finding each other?

We organise information days in all our members. If I organise an information day in Belgium, for example, I often get the question: Bart, how am I going to find partners in Widening countries? This is a fair point, but you have to reach out to partners or meet them at conferences. I understand this is not the most easy thing to do. We’re not a hop-on scheme, [the condition] needs to be there from the proposal stage. But this is something that we put in the hands of the people who apply to COST Actions.  It can be a barrier, but if we look at the number of proposals that come in, it’s substantial. We had more than 500 proposals last time.

You also use double-blind evaluation to pick your grantees. Why and how does it work?

The main idea of COST is that if you’re a young researcher with a good idea coming from a university in the most eastern part of Moldova, you have equal chances in applying to a grant as Fraunhofer teaming up with CNRS and Oxford University in order to submit a proposal. That’s the reason we make it double-blind.

So, as an evaluator, you don’t see who wrote the proposal. This is unique to COST. If they evaluate a proposal, it has to be truly anonymous. That’s the tricky part. Some of our proposals are ineligible because of that reason. It fully explains this on our website, but you cannot, for example, make reference to a Horizon Europe project with these partners and we want to continue to do that. This is not possible, because it creates bias with the evaluators: this university is good, this proposal must be good as well.

That’s why we do it completely blind, in terms of evaluators and anonymity of the text itself. We look at the idea, how you’re going to bring this network together and why is it relevant, why do these people need to meet in this specific research field and develop stuff. Also, for young researchers, if they have less experience and have to list all the projects they’ve been involved in and all the conferences you’ve presented in, it could create bias. That’s why it’s not allowed in our proposal system.