Discovery Grant recipients to receive top-up funding from latest increase to NSERC budget

Winners in the latest NSERC Discovery Grants Program (DGP) competition will see their grant sizes increased retroactively using a portion of the $30 million in non-directed funds the agency received in the last federal Budget.

"More than $5 million will be distributed across all the grants", says Dr Pierre Charest, VP Research Grants and Scholarships at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), adding that an allocation formula has yet to be finalized. "Four years ago, NSERC got $15 million more for Discovery Grants and that was the last year for an infusion of money into the cycle."

The 2016 DGP competition provided $70.1 million in new and renewed grants, pushing the program's overall budget for this year to $341 million. When scholarships and fellowships ($82 million), research supplements ($15 million) and equipment grants ($26 million) are included, the total disbursement for 2016 is $465 million.

The moderate increases in the success rates and average size of Discovery Grants is being viewed by the research community with cautious optimism. With a modest increase in the DGP competition success rate to 66.1%, many are hopeful that the years of stagnant and falling support for undirected fundamental research is finally over, setting the stage for a research and innovation Budget expected as early as 2017.

Conference Model now accepted

The 2016 DGP competition also marks the seventh year of full implementation of NSERC's Conference Model and bin system for adjudicating and allocating funding. Charest points to a 2014 international review panel and a recent exit survey that found a high rate of satisfaction with the system, which was launched with considerable controversy in 2010 (R$, April 23/10).

"The satisfaction rate (of the survey) was 90% which puts us in a pretty good place for our Conference Model," he says. "It's a unique model to the world."

The Conference Model uses peer review to place applicants in 16 "quality bins" where they are judged on excellence of researcher, merit of proposal and contribution to the training of personnel.

While the majority of disciplines did not experience any significant changes in success rates of award sizes, Charest says the number of applications and awards in chemistry are "coming back up" after a decline was red-flagged in 2014.

"The evaluation group (for chemistry) wanted to keep award levels high but not up to the bin level, so people applied to other groups," says Charest. "Two years ago we noticed it and told the evaluation group they couldn't do that."

The two evaluation groups responsible for life sciences applications also saw increases which Charest says was driven by research applications that fall between the mandates of NSERC and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The uptick in NSERC life science applications is likely due to the significant budgetary squeeze experienced by CIHR. as it seeks to fulfill the needs of its research constituency, prompting researchers to follow the money.

Another positive development is the dramatic increase in the success rate of early career researchers. Of the 494 who applied, 369 or 74.7% were successful, compared to the 64.8% success rate of the 489 who applied in 2015.

Charest says the improvement is most likely due to the higher quality of applicants put forward by the universities.

"We are demand-driven although we always hope for high success rates," he says. "The universities are preparing applicants better and there are support systems for new people coming into the system."

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