Distributed Peer Review - Post Outcome Survey

Overview

The BBSRC Pioneer Awards 2025-26 is a £5M investment aimed at funding novel adventurous research avenues with the potential to transform our fundamental understanding of living systems. 

As you know, UKRI used Distributed Peer Review (DPR) as part of the application review process for this funding opportunity.  For DPR, all applicants were also assessors and reviewed other proposals submitted to the same funding opportunity. UKRI normally runs funding opportunities using an expert peer review process, inviting external academic experts as reviewers. However, this is a resource and time intensive process. In this pilot, DPR was used to identify and prioritise the most competitive applications for assessment by an independent expert panel. 

We know that there are some advantages and disadvantages to using DPR. For example, DPR requires applicants to spend additional time completing reviews. However, a DPR process can also reduce the time taken from applications made to decisions communicated. Also, applicants to a specific opportunity can be better placed to judge other applications due to increased knowledge of the opportunity scope. 

The DPR comments and scores should now be available to you on TFS. This survey is to understand your views on the process now you have had the opportunity to reflect on the outcomes. 

Why your views matter

UKRI is currently trialling DPR across a range of opportunities and we would like to understand the views of participants in this process. 

We would be grateful if you could share your thoughts with us by completing this short survey by Friday 7 August 2026. Please access and evaluate the outcomes of your DPR assessment before continuing with this survey. We expect it to take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete. 

We recognise that in this funding opportunity DPR was used as a prioritisation process and did not constitute a full review, but for the sake of clarity we have used the term review in this survey. 
 
Your responses to this survey will be anonymous. Thank you.