CIHR announces results of latest operating grants competition as it gears up for change

The Canadian Institutes (CIHR) has announced the results of its latest twice-annual Open Operating Grants Program (OGP) competition, with an investment of $238.4 million to support 400 researchers over six years. An additional 53 grants were awarded using priority announcements and other sources of funding, boosting the total to 453 for a success rate of 20.1%.

There will be two more OGP competitions before the competition is held in conjunction with the first live pilot of the Foundation Scheme — a new feature developed as part of the council's comprehensive overhaul of its program categories and peer review processes.

"OGP drives the pipeline. We have committed to at least 400 grants per competition — a commitment we made several years ago because application pressure fluctuates," says Dr Jane Aubin, CIHR's VP research and chief scientific officer. "This has added great stability to the conversation. OGP is slowly increasing as is grant size and there is concern that as inflation drives research and processes, there are requests for larger grant sizes."

The latest competition saw average grant awards of $596,022 (medium of $452,113) with an average duration of 3.8 years.

CIHR was able to honour its commitment to the research community by applying a 24% across-the-board cuts to all awards — an action it has taken over the past several OPG competitions. The council's budget has been stagnant or falling in recent years as program review-related cuts have taken their toll while the size of the research community gradually increases.

The most recent Statistics Canada data show that CIHR funding declined $36 million or 3.4 % to $1.0 billion in FY12-13 before inflation is factored in.

"They (across-the-board cuts) have been in effect for several years now, reflecting the slowly increasing envelope size and to maintain the 400 grant level. It allows us to keep a balance between number and size," says Aubin.

To keep the number of applicants at a manageable level, CIHR has been "discouraging researchers from immediately resubmitting unsuccessful applications to the next competition with no change or reflection" and that "after an application has been unsuccessful two or three times that it not be resubmitted".

"We ask people to look at the review comments (on their unsuccessful applications) and balance their desire to resubmit with changes to a proposal to increase the likelihood of success … It's mainly to alleviate peer review and application burden, says Aubin, noting the CIHR currently has 12 programs, 53 committees and more than 800 reviewers."

That will change once CIHR phases in major changes to reduce the number of open programs from 12 to two and extend the duration of applicable awards to seven years (R$, March 15/12). The Foundation Scheme is designed to support research programs and the Project Scheme applies to specific projects with a defined end point.

"We're doing this for a multitude of reasons but it's primarily to reduce funding program complexity, reduce application burden and workload," says Aubin, adding that the changes won't be completed for at least two more years.

"We're moving away from a committee-based peer review system to an application-centric process," says Aubin. NSERC?and CIHR have both made changes to its processes because we felt the need to overhaul the system."

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council introduced its new Conference Model in 2009 (R$, April 30/09).

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