transcript Event ID: DEB Core Programs Solicitation Webinar Event Started: 9/12/2011 1:26:46 PM ET OPERATOR: Please stand by for realtime captions. Please stand by your conference will begin momentarily. Please stand by. Excuse me this is the operator. Hold your line for the conference. If you can hear me please respond. Thank you. Please stand by your conference will begin at approximately 10 minutes. Please stand by -- please stand by, your conference is scheduled to begin in three minutes. Welcome, and thank You for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. During the question and answer session please press * then 1 on your touch tone phone. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections may disconnect at this time. Now I will turn the meeting over to Mr. Allen Tessier. [Presentation Title, Slide 1] ALAN: Welcome, this is a webinar presentation by the Division of Environmental Biology to introduce our new solicitation for core programs. My name is Alan Tessier, I'm here at NSF in a room with a number of other program officers from all of the different clusters within the Division of Environmental Biology. This is being recorded, and this entire presentation, voice included, will be available for download after this. So if you have to leave, you can always go back and access this from the same website where you registered. There are about 18 slides here. And we will try to get through them pretty fast. You'll have to hold your questions until the end. We are enforcing that. Your microphones are muted. You will not be able to have any voice come across. You can make use of the chat window if you need to. You can always e-mail questions to DEBQuestions@nsf.gov after this presentation as well and we will be answering those if you don't find your question answered here. [Slide 2] What is changing here? As of the next deadline dates which would have been January 9th and still is January 9th, proposal submissions will have to conform to a new division-wide solicitation that's NSF 11-573 which of course is available on the NSF website and the URL link is shown on the slide. We said conform to the solicitation, because there are obviously other solicitations that you can submit proposals to including two core programs. And, they are described within this solicitation as to how this solicitation impacts submissions through those other solicitations. [Slide 3] Okay specifically what is changing. This new solicitation is actually one of several new solicitations which have been issued by the Biological Sciences Directorate. As many of you know, several years ago, one of the four divisions within BIO, the Division of Biological Infrastructure, shifted to once a year submissions to their programs. A little more recently, in May 2011, the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences changed the way they receive proposals and shifted to once every eight months' submission with only a single submission allowed per PI each time. So that's three times every two years. The rest of our presentation here concerns two very recently announced solicitations, one governing IOS and one governing DEB, that's the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems and the Division of Environmental Biology. Even though there are two different solicitations, they are very similar and parallel. Both the of these solicitations require that proposals submitted to the core programs in those divisions have to start with a pre-proposal submitted to the January deadline. The January 9th deadline is for DEB and IOS may be a different day but it's still a January deadline. Full proposals are by invitation only. And their submission date is in August, August 2 for the DEB. [Slide 4] What types of proposals are being affected by this solicitation? Basically, any proposal that is a research proposal that would have normally been submitted to our January or July panel cycle deadlines, either through the Grant Proposal Guide for NSF or directly to the program descriptions for the programsin IOS or DEB. They must now conform to these new solicitations. In addition, any proposal that would have been submitted to one of these two divisions through the RUI, the Research in Undergraduate Institutions, or through the Long-term Research in Environmental Biology, LTREB, solicitations must conform to the same new solicitation which requires pre-proposals in January. [Slide 5] In IOS what we mean by those core programs are any of the programs listed on this slide in the four clusters of IOS. There is a separate webinar that will be scheduled to discuss these changes with the IOS program officers. [Slide 6] In DEB we also have four clusters and here's a listing of all the programs that are affected by this new solicitation. [Slide 7] There are a number of existing solicitations that are very relevant for investigators who are typically supported by DEB; and, they are not changed by this solicitation. They are not impacted in any way. We list some examples here. Obviously the CAREER solicitation which has been NSF wide, which has a July deadline once a year, those proposals will still be accepted by all these core programs at the July deadline. And then there are a number of other solicitations you see here that are not changed. The deadlines may be revised from year to year if the solicitations change, but they are not impacted by the new solicitations in DEB or IOS. Some of these however, like RCN accept proposals and the solicitation instructs principle investigators to submit them to a core program, depending on the deadlines for that core program. In DEB that will be the August 2 full proposal deadline. Note also that the DDIGs, Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants, are not changing. Those are still coming in as full proposals according to the deadline in that solicitation. Also, all of the programs in IOS and DEB will continue to accept the conference and workshop proposals, EAGERs, RAPIDs, or supplements to existing awards as described in the grant proposal guide for NSF so there are no changes to those types of special requests. [Slide 8] Okay, why are we making these changesin DEB and IOS? What was the motivation for this? Over the last decade, there have been rather dramatic changes in the number of proposals submitted to NSF overall, but particularly within BIO. Everybody, both people at NSF handling those proposals and people in the science community writing and reviewing those proposals, have remarked on the trend. Basically, at this point we are approaching the situation where 90% of the proposals being written and reviewed are being declined. These proposals have to be revised and resubmitted, on average, two or three times before they are funded, if they are funded. And this is basically making the entire system very inefficient in terms of workload for everybody: people writing the proposals and reviewing them and handling them at our end. It was really these trends which were followed over the past several years that were the motivation to make these changes. And let me come back to that in a minute. But first show you some data for DEB to indicate what I mean by these trends. [Slide 9] Here you can see that during the past decade the number of submitted projects, that is to say unique individual projects, counting collaboratives as a single project, have increased over the last 10 years, nearly doubling within DEB. And you will note that our awards on the other hand have been pretty unchanged. Now, it is true that our budgets went up substantially during the first half of this decade. But, the fact of the matter is that the cost of doing science also went up. And, the scale of requests has increased. And so, the number of awards is not changed very much and the success rate for funding has declined and is quickly approaching the 10% level on average. You will note that the one year that was a good year for success rate was the year that we received the stimulus funding. Indicated by ARRA [in the graph]. [Slide 10] So success rate having declined is an index of the problem here. But the real problem is perhaps seen best by looking at the burden on the reviewing community. The number of total reviews that we had to request to handle the increasing number of proposals being submitted, continued to rise during the first half of the 2000-2010 decade. And in DEB we tried to get about half the reviews from expert ad hoc review requests and the other half by panelist. Here you can see how the number of ad hoc and panelist reviews rose until about 2006. At that point, we were so overburdened with proposals that in DEB we basically made the decision to reduce the number of ad hoc reviews that we were requesting, so you can see that the red line, the ad hoc review line, begins to drop. We had to do that because our workload in getting more panelists and more panels was what we had to focus on and you can see the number of panelist reviews continued to increase. To that effect, we could see we were slowly and gradually switching over to a panel-only review process and often losing valuable expert reviews. I think everyone out there noticed this change. It became very common to only have four reviews going back to people in the last year or so. As opposed to in 2004-2005 it was more typically five or six reviews. Also, the quality of reviews begin to decline. In 2006, NSF launched a massive survey of the science community, sending out requests to over 44,000 individuals: everyone who had submitted a proposal as a PI or co-PI during 2004, 2005, and 2006. More than 50% of those people responded to the survey: 24,000 responses. Overwhelmingly, people indicated that the reviewer burden was getting out of control. They were having to review so much that the quality of their own reviews was going down. They felt that NSF really needed to do something. Over 55% of the respondents indicated that in their minds preliminary proposals were something NSF should consider moving toward. That report is public. It is called IPAMM and you can find it from the NSF search. Since that time from 2007 when that report was released, we in DEB have talked with panelists routinely and have talked with our committee of visitors and we talked with advisory committees and heard the message that something had to be done to reduce the workload of writing, reviewing and recommending proposals. [Slide 11] So what are the details inside this new solicitation? We said it is a once-a-year deadline now, in January. It requires a pre-proposal that comes in. The pre-proposal has only four pages of text and one page that describes the PI, Co-PI, and senior personnel team. Preliminary proposals are a requirement in order to submit a full proposal and there is a limit on how many pre-proposals can be submitted in January. The limit is two per individual if the individual is a PI or a co-PI on any planned institutional submission, so if it would be submitted as a collaborative project at the full proposal stage, anyone that is a PI on one of those institutional submissions is restricted to no more than two pre-proposal submissions. In addition, if you are going to be the lead individual on a sub-award of any of those submissions, you also fall under this restriction. Not included on the limit here are other senior personnel. Individuals who could be involved in the project as other senior personnel, if they are not a PI or a co-PI or a lead on a sub-award, there are no restrictions on how many pre=proposals you can be involved in. The pre-proposals will be reviewed by panel only. You would expect to get three reviews back from them as well as a panel summary. And the panel will be advising NSF program officers on whether to invite or not invite the full proposal. And we will get those decisions out in early May. If you are invited, you then have until the August 2 deadline to prepare your full proposal and submit it. Only invited proposals will be allowed to submit for the August deadline. The only exception to that would be proposals that come in as RCNs or OPUS proposals, those two are not having to go through the proposal stage because they have separate solicitations. And LTREB renewals, regular first time LTREB proposals do have to go through the pre-proposal stage. But the renewal which is viewed at the five-year stage can come in August 2 without having gone through the pre-proposal. The full proposals will be reviewed again by panels. But depending on the program officer, they may also request ad hoc expert reviews. And we anticipate that the full proposal panel will occur around October and then we would be giving decisions about awards or declines by the beginning of December. A month before the pre-proposals are starting again. [Slide 12] So to summarize this cycle that we anticipate having, the annual cycle that starts in January, and for those who get awards hearing decisions by the beginning of December. [Slide 13] The pre-proposal format should be far less work to produce. In addition to the standard cover page and project summary, the project description as I said is only five pages and the first page is simply a listing of all the senior personnel. Within that list, you have to indicate the status of each person and the role they would play on a full proposal. In essence, there are two groups of people there are those that fall under the restriction of being a PI, a co-PI, or lead on a sub-award and then there are other senior personnel you can include but who are not falling under restriction on being on only two pre-proposals. These other senior personnel as well as the PI, co-PI and sub award leads are all allowed to include their biographical sketches and the format largely follows the GPG. But there are some changes: one of the changes is that the list of conflicts is submitted by a single copy document for everybody involved. The main pre-proposal will really be just the 4 pages, pages 2-5 of the project description. And there are no budgets required and there is no section on facilities, no appendices or other supplementary documents will be allowed. This includes no need for a post-doc mentoring plan and no data management plan on the pre-proposal. [Slide 14] What guidance are we trying to give people on the pre-proposals? As with any proposal of course, it should be a pretty compelling and convincing argument that makes a reviewer want to fund this. But more specifically we have spent quite a bit of time when we were planning this, thinking about what guidance we would give to panels and reviewers as they look at these pre-proposals. [Slide 15] The advice we are giving people, it is sort of bulleted here. I would say the first three bullets are all addressing a similar issue, which is what is the proposal about, what is the main question? What is the main phenomenon under study? What's the novel idea that the PI has? Are these answered in terms of addressing something that captures the interest of reviewers and in terms of its potential to advance knowledge that is general and beyond just the specific study systems. In addition, the pre-proposal should also describe the basic approach to be used to address this question or hypothesis or whatever the aims are. And, it should also, making use of the bio sketches, but also describing specifically in the pre-proposal project description, the ability of the team to conduct this research. And fourth, it should outline what the broader impacts would be. So the review criteria are still basically intellectual merit and broader impacts. And the intellectual merit will really focus on what is the main idea, what's the approach and what's capability of the team to carry it out? [Slide 16] The pre-proposal panels will be advisory to the program officers. What we will ask the pre-proposal panel to give us feedback on is outlined here. In many ways they are the same issues that we ask panels on full proposals to evaluate. But I think the key here is that on the pre-proposal it really will be more front and center: how novel, how innovative are the questions being addressed here? What is the motivation? How is it conceptually grounded within frameworks or theories that have been used to address these phenomena? What is the approach? Is it feasible? Does it look feasible? Is it innovative? Perhaps classic questions being addressed from a novel approach? And again, how well qualified are the PIs, Co-PIs, and other senior personnel? And is there a convincing and sincere effort to broaden the impact of his work if it were to be conducted? Again the panels will be advisory to program officers and recommending invite or do not invite. Ultimately, the program officers will make the decision. They will consider other things that we will not ask the panel to consider such as: other existing awards in the program that already exist in our portfolio, what we are already funding; the diversity of our portfolio with regard to the career level, young versus more senior people, Underrepresented groups and geographic location and institution types. It is the responsibility of the program officers to balance the portfolio. [Slide 17 did not correctly display and was skipped] [Slide 18] One of the issues that we get asked a lot, is what NSF means by potentially transformative? We had a couple of slides here and I will see if the next slide has the other one. But this slide discusses risk grapicaly and is something we show panels and will probably continue to show pre-proposal panels as well. What we mean by risk and basically what it describes here is that risk has two dimensions. There is the boldness risk which is something we really value. We are looking for ideas that are bold and innovative. At the same time there is recognition of risk coming from feasibility and the ability to conduct or have the research work out to get answers and historically people tend to balance these two by wanting to reduce feasibility risk while maximizing boldness risks. The line describing the distinction between invite and not invite decisions is meant to imply that we recognize it is not a simple trade-off here, that We really value the boldness and riskiness even if it incurs substantial feasibility risk. And so we ask panelists to take that into consideration when making a recommendation. I lost the other slide. [laughter] [Narration for missing slide 17] The other issue I will just describe for you, is this notion of transformative potential. We obviously, as you probably have heard, tend to value the potential of proposals to transform a discipline as a key intellectual merit. And recently the National Science Board directed that potentially transformative research should be part of the intellectual review criteria of all proposals. One of the ways we tell panelists that they should consider this in their own minds, is to consider the potential for an increase in knowledge advancement from a particular proposed idea and to really look for proposals that seem to be on the cutting edge of ideas. They may not be ideas that have really caught on yet but they seem to be ideas that have potential to really generate a lot of new interest and knowledge, and so we try to instruct panelists that the difference between incremental research and this research that has the potential to really transform a field is really what we mean by transformative potential. [Slide 19] The questions can now get started in a minute. I just want to point out that there are resources online for you and obviously the solicitation is something you should read in-depth. There's also some frequently asked questions which we are not sure how frequently they will be asked because we started this with what we were asking ourselves when we were putting this together. You can e-mail any DEB program officer for questions. We also have a central e-mail address it is one word: DEBquestions@NSF.gov. And this webinar posting -and we'll put the correct slide on for that transformative potential slide- will be posted at the same website where you registered for this. If you have specific concerns at a more general level, you can send an e-mail to Penny Firth who is the acting Division Director in DEB or, and some of you may not know this yet but, we have a new Assistant Director for Biological Sciences, John Wingfield, who is a former Division Director in IOS. And you can also send concerns to him directly. Okay I think we are going to switch over to entertaining questions at this point. OPERATOR: If you would like to ask an audio question please press star then one on your touch tone phone. If you want to withdraw your request please press star then two. Once again to ask a question please press star one. One moment please. Kathryn Burns you may ask your question. KATHRYN: My question is: How much do you expect this new strategy to increase the fund rate? Is there a target fund rate you guys are shooting for? ALAN: I'm not sure exactly we mean by fund rate? KATHRYN: Success of getting an award if you submitted an application. ALAN: We are anticipating that there will be a lot of pre-proposals and there will still be a filter there. There is still going to be a significant reduction in what gets invited. And then there is going to be another filter at the full proposal stage and we are hoping that for the full proposals our funding rate will be significantly higher than it currently is now. That is to say that the reason for putting in this pre-proposal as a filter is to reduce the work that needs to be done at the full proposals stage to have a higher likelihood of being funded. Our overall budget is not changing here. Not that we know our budget in the future. [laughter] Our budget is set by Congress at any given moment we may not know what we will have in front of us. In terms of budget and the number of awards, the size of awards, the types of awards, where those awards are going, we are not necessarily anticipating any changes there. What we are trying to do is reduce the work involved in getting to that point. KATHRYN: I guess my question would more appropriately be asked [as]: of those people or groups submitting full proposals, is there a rate you are shooting to get? Are you going to be soliciting a lot of full proposals, a drastically reduced number of proposals, half the number of current proposals? ALAN: This is the first time through but We are certainly hoping that the funding rate from the full proposal panel will be 2 to 3 times greater than it has been currently. That is to say yes we are hoping it will be higher. But do we have a number or something? Are we trying to manage the success rate? No. KATHRYN: Okay thanks. OPERATOR: Once again if you would like to ask a question. Please press star then one. One moment. At this time I show no further questions. I'm sorry one just popped up. One moment. Seth Borenstein you may ask your question. SETH: Yes I was wondering what the expected workload would be for panel members during the pre-proposal evaluation? In other words, is it expected that they will be doing about double what we are used to in the past? Because there may be twice as many short proposals coming in? ALAN: We would love suggestions on what you think you can do. [laughter] SETH: Yes. That's a good answer. At least there is flexibility in discussing it. ALAN: We are still planning how we will run the pre-proposal panels, since they are not going to be occurring until about next March or April. So we don't have decisions fully on this. And we would actually love your opinions of what kind of load you can handle. We certainly anticipate it would be more pre-proposals that a panelist will read than full proposals would have been. But it's not exactly the same math that you can do it by the number of pages right? So we realize it will be quite a bit more than full proposals. But, other than that, it is still a bit of an experiment for us and it will depend on how many pre-proposals are submitted. SETH: Okay. And do you expect that the invite and non-invite line will be determined by the panel recommending who should be above that line or below that line? ALAN: Well, we wouldn't go to all the effort to have a panel if we weren't going to take their advice very seriously. And in general, we do follow their advice in regard to the intellectual and broader impact merits. But as I said, we also have other constraints that we are responsible for in balancing our portfolio to fulfill NSF's mission. Therefore, there may be times when a panel invites and we say not invite and there may be times where the panel says not invite and we say invite. But in general we expect a pretty high correlation between what the panel says and what we end up doing. SETH: Thank you. And if I can, one final question. Will the panel members be different between pre-proposal review and the final review? ALAN: Yes. I'm seeing a lot of nodding heads around the room by the program officers that will be running those panels. But yes, we certainly intend that there will be not just the same people. There might be some overlap. But by far, we are really shooting for different panels. SETH: Thank you. OPERATOR: Your next question is from Jim -- JOHN ADAMEC: Hold on one second. We have a couple questions that came in through text from folks who are not attached to the audio line. So we are going to handle one of those really quickly and then trade off to the next audio person. OPERATOR: Thanks. SAM: Hello this is Sam Scheiner. We have a question, I'll just read it: "for the title of the proposal project I do not understand what is meant by additional acronyms for accomplishments-based renewal, ABR, or research in undergraduate institutions, RUI?" So the ABR and RUI are particular categories of proposals, this also holds for OPUS. You are asked when you submit those proposals to start the title with that acronym and it just makes it easier for everybody to know that this is a special category of proposal. But otherwise, those proposals are going to go through the same panel and have pretty much the same review criteria. I hope that answered your question. JOHN: Okay we will go to the next audio question please. OPERATOR: James Gosz. JAMES: Hello I was wondering if this change in the DEB and BIO has been reviewed by the science board and whether you see this as a long-term change in programming and whether or not other divisions and directorates are going to follow suit? PENNY: Hi Jim this is Penny Firth here and the change we are making has been looked at by a variety of folks around the foundation and of course was approved all the way up to the director of the foundation. And we are in fact going into this hoping it will make a positive change, but open to the possibility of altering or adjusting in future years if the data seem to demand some kind of tuning up in the future but we are hoping that what we tried this time will work. JAMES: And broader throughout the foundation? And discussing from other directorates? PENNY: Yes. JAMES: Positive you mean? PENNY: Yes positive and discussion. Positive discussion. JAMES: Okay. JOHN: We have another text question we're going to tackle quickly. SAM: So there is a question about how much detail does the pre-proposal panel expect in terms of broader impact compared to the product description? I would say it is the same ratio as you would have in the regular proposal. So in a 15 page regular proposal there is somewhere between half a page and a full page typically on broader impacts so on a proportional basis, that would be some were between a quarter to a half of a page at most on broader impacts in a pre-proposal. JOHN: Okay do we have any more audio questions on the line? OPERATOR: Yes next will be Jacob Kerby. JACOB: Hi, I have a question on the logistics of the pre-proposal panel, is it going to be similar to the regular panel? That is, are the reviewers going to judge it on a sort of poor, good, excellent criteria and then I guess the idea is instead of a fund or do not fund subdivision of categories it's an invite to panel for a full proposal or no full proposal recommendations? And with that also a secondary question will the pre-proposal panels have ad hoc panelists as well? Or is it simply a panel at that stage? ALAN: So a few questions there. The pre-proposals will not have ad hoc reviews. These would be panel only reviews. How those panels will run is something that there may be some experiments with. But, in general, in DEB we are thinking of still having three panelists who write reviews and those reviews would have scores submitted through FastLane and all proposals will be reviewed on a five-point scale from Poor to Excellent. The panel will meet and discuss each of the pre-proposals. And again, mostly it will revolve around preassigned panelists and we are likely going to just ask them to give us a thumbs-up or thumbs down, invite or not invite recommendation categories on the proposals. We don't rank the individual ones. But we will obviously want to hear from the panelists as to why. And there will be a panel summary written to give you feedback on how those panelists ended up feeling about a given proposal. JACOB: Just a follow-up question, that panel summary if you're invited for a full proposal, will we get that panel summary or no? ALAN: Yes you will get it regardless. You'll get the reviews, everybody will get the reviews and the panel summary. If for some reason a program decides to not follow the advice of the panel, then you would also get a comment from the program officer explaining why. JACOB: Okay thank you. SAM: Okay so we have on the chat line the question, "can you comment on the proposal limit per PI? Especially in light of the potential impacts on funding of collaborative interdisciplinary research?" So, the way we came up with the limit of two per person was actually by a detailed analysis of how many proposals the average person is submitting in a given year or is involved in. Most people, 95% I believe, submit only one or two proposals per year. So that limit should affect very very few individuals. And we would remind you that you can be involved in more than two proposals but it would be in the other senior personnel category. The only thing this limits you to is in roles of PI, Co-PI, or lead on a sub-award. We don't actually expect this to really affect collaboration or interdisciplinary research. And we'll also remind you of course that this is only for the core programs and we have a number of other programs, many of them aimed specifically at interdisciplinary research where a lot of those kinds of proposals come in. JOHN: We have another question on text that we will answer. ALAN: This is a once a year call and the question is "what will the process be for resubmitting pre-proposals that are not invited or invited proposals that are not funded?" In general, if you are declined either at a pre-proposal or full proposal stage you have to start over again with a new pre-proposal on the January 9 deadline. So we are not -- you know -- it does mean if you are declined on all pre-proposals, which you hear in May, you have to wait until January 9 if you are planning to submit another proposal to the core programs. As Sam said, we have a lot of other deadlines for other solicitations which come up during the course of the year. But if you are planning a proposal to come in to, for instance, the Ecosystems Science program the deadline is January 9 for pre-proposals regardless of whether or not it is a resubmission. SAM: And just to sort of amplify this, people need to keep in mind as Alan already said, the number of awards we are going to make is not going to change. So your ultimate chance of getting funded really will be the same. It's just you are submitting once a year rather than twice. So we will get twice as many pre-proposals in January as we would have gotten full proposals across the year. And most people only actually submit once a year. So again, for some people it will be a shift in terms of when they put the proposal in but no real effective change in what is going to happen in terms of funding. SAM: Any other audio questions? OPERATOR: We do have one more question. Kai Hung. KAI: Hello yes, my question is, with the review on the pre-proposal the comments from the panel, are those going to be advanced to be seen by the full proposal review? In other words are we doing a cumulative scoring between the two rounds? Or do we start completely clean at the full proposal round? ALAN: That's actually a question we haven't discussed much internally, but we are. Basically the full proposal will not, again it will be a different panel than the pre-proposal, it will be different people and they will start out reading that full proposal without any other information in front of them other than the full proposal. So their review initially for sure is based only on the full proposal. We haven't talked in-house about whether or not we would show the panelists when they arrived the panel summary from the pre-proposal panel. So I cannot answer that part of the question. But certainly the reviews including ad hoc reviews will be based solely on the full proposal submission. KAI: Thank you. JOHN: Do we have any other questions at this time by audio or chat, if you so desire? OPERATOR: There are no questions on the audio side. ALAN: In that case, I want to thank everybody, please let people know this is being posted. Other people who could not make this I am sure may want to download and listen to it. And again, you can submit questions to DEBquestions@NSF.gov. And if we hear certain ones that we think are really relevant or clarifiying we will also adjust the frequently asked questions or add new ones there. So again thank you all. OPERATOR: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for attending. You may disconnect at this time. [Event Concluded]