Desk Rejection Shadow Experiment: pre-experiment survey

Participants will be provided with an Excel template in which to record their scores. You are not expected to provide any comments on applications but there will be space on the spreadsheet if you choose to do so. You can leave this column blank. You should not include any personal information about an applicant (e.g. name or institution) in this column. 

Once you have scored all applications assigned to you and filled in your spreadsheet, you can submit this to the project co-ordinator in the Metascience Unit team. The scores you share will be added to an overall spreadsheet. Both your name and the funding opportunity your scores relate to will be assigned a code so that it is not possible to identify you. The data will be stored in a password protected folder with access restricted to a sub-set of Metascience Unit staff involved in the administration of this shadow experiment. 

The Metascience Unit is administering this shadow desk rejection experiment within UKRI. This experiment is also part of a global multi-funder desk rejection experiment coordinated by the Research on Research Institute (RORI) at UCL. This partnership with RORI means UKRI benefits from a bigger sample size to understand the feasibility and effectiveness of desk rejection.  We will only share score data with RORI to enable cross-funder comparison. We will not share with RORI any of your personal information, any applicant information, or the names of the UKRI funding opportunities involved in the experiment. The partnership is subject to a data sharing agreement reviewed by UKRI Legal and UKRI Information Governance.