Medical Research funders work together on evaluation
Following the success of the Medical Research Council e-Val system, now supported by Research Fish Ltd, some of the largest UK Medical Research charities, the Association of Medical Research Charities, the MRC and Chief Scientists Office , Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates collaborated on the development of a single shared question set for reporting research outcomes. This brought the needs of Public and Charitable medical research funders together for the first time to develop a joined-up approach to the evaluation of research.
Arthritis Research UK, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, The Association of Medical Research Charities, Medical Research Council and the Chief Scientist Office, Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates worked together for 8 months to agree a common set of reporting requirements. Research Fish Ltd has developed the system to meet these requirements. The aim was to make reporting across the medical research community more consistent and to provide more informative and robust metrics for funders, at the same time as reducing reporting burden on researchers.
The ‘working party’ collaborated in response to the pressing need to reduce the burden of reporting on researchers, who currently spend large amounts of time reporting the same information to multiple funders. The new system will allow researchers to enter information (e.g. publications) once, on-line in a standard way, and then assign it to the relevant funders. In addition the researcher will be able to delegate tasks to others, generate their CVs and down-load their research outputs in several useful formats. A pilot, of the approach run in 2011, was received well by researchers and their feedback has helped to shape the shared system.
Funding organisations that participate in the new shared approach will be able to automatically download comprehensive impact and outcomes reports from the Researchfish e-Val system and streamline interim, annual and end of grant reporting. There are no limits to the number of users of the reporting tool, so the information collected through the system can be used and reused multiple times, by many people.
The AMRC endorse this approach as it will enable cross sector reporting capabilities and again reduce the administrative burden on their members. Members of the working party and other funding agencies are in discussion concerning launching the system in the summer of 2012.