The Network of Academic Solidarity and Engagement (MASA) makes a request for increasing the transparency of the public competition for financing short-term projects of special interest for sustainable development in AP Vojvodina in 2020, which was announced on May 15, 2020 by the Provincial Secretariat for Higher Education and Scientific Research of AP Vojvodina.
Guided by experiences from previous competitions for short-term projects, as well as by the fact that they are already members of the academic community indicated the non-transparency of the allocation of funds by that, but also other contests for the financing of scientific projects, we would like to express our concern about the new possibility of the allocation of public funds being non-transparent, which could lead to certain projects being favored based on non-professional criteria.
From a formal point of view, the key problems of the Secretariat's contests so far were insufficiently clear criteria for evaluating projects, as well as insufficient transparency of the evaluation process. Registered researchers, whose projects were not approved for funding, did not receive information about the reasons for rejection or the number of points achieved, while information about the rejection of the project was delivered after the contracts had already been signed with the candidates whose project proposals were approved. For the above reasons, there is a justified fear that budget funds were not spent in a way that is in the best interest of the public and science.
In order to enable greater transparency in the evaluation of projects and the way funds are allocated, we ask the Secretariat to when announcing the results of the currently open competition for short-term projects, as well as when announcing future projects and regulations that define, state and publish them:
- the structure of the overall assessment of the project, i.e. to specify precisely how many points each of the defined criteria carries within the total evaluation rulebook;
- the formula for calculating the competence of the research team and the competence of the manager, as criteria for the evaluation of project proposals;
- the quota of the number of projects by scientific field that receive funding;
- the entire ranking list of all submitted project proposals with the evaluation structure according to the specified criteria, at the time of publication of the results of the competition;
- the names and biographies of the members of the expert councils selected in the competition published in February 2020 (with guarantees for competence, impartiality and independence) who carry out the evaluation of the projects;
- the results of the competition, which should be publicly available and easily accessible on the Secretariat's website;
In addition to the above, we also ask that:
- the results of the project evaluation are sent by email to all those who applied for it before making the final decision on financing, and to provide candidates with a legal deadline for filing appeals on the evaluation results;
- in subsequent competitions, the review and evaluation of projects of candidates from the same institution is defined as a conflict of interest, and in these cases the Secretariat engages external reviewers, and ideally all projects are evaluated by persons who are not employed in institutions from AP Vojvodina;
- finally, given that the Rulebook allows the Provincial Secretary to allocate funds without the opinion of the council, which is contrary to what MASA stands for, we believe that in such cases the total number of projects or the total amount of financial resources must be stated for which the Provincial Secretary can use his discretionary right to allocate funds beyond the opinion and assessment of the expert council, as well as to clearly mark such projects after the results of the competition.
We hope that the Provincial Secretariat for Higher Education and Scientific Research of AP Vojvodina will respect these requests and take appropriate steps in order to send a message to the academic community that the true quality of scientific and research work is primarily valued in project competitions. We believe that this would contribute in the most efficient way to the necessary restoration of the confidence of the academic community in the expediency of applying for such competitions, in which we see a mutual benefit, both for the Provincial Secretariat as the initiator of the competition for the allocation of funds, and the academic community as their beneficiary.
