Assessment process
Eligibility and remit
UKRI will check applications for eligibility and remit.
Expert review
Following UKRI eligibility and remit checks, AI Open Access applications will be subject to distributed peer review (DPR).
In DPR, applicants are also assessors and review other applications submitted to the same funding opportunity to decide who gets funding. By submitting an application, applicants agree to act as reviewers and to have their application reviewed by their peers.
The DPR rules and guidelines are in the Additional info section under ‘Supporting documents’. It is important that you read these carefully before applying.
By applying for this scheme, you are consenting to take part in DPR. Do not apply for this opportunity if you would prefer not to take part in the DPR process.
By submitting an application, you accept the following terms and conditions:
- all applicants will receive up to five applications to review, of varying level of resource request
- the reviewer is expected to carefully read all the assigned applications, rate them and provide feedback to the applicants following the rules and guidelines
- failing to provide the reviews by the deadline will lead to the automatic rejection of the application submitted by the given applicant
By using different reviewer pools, applications will be assigned to reviewers in such a way that scoring an application has no bearing on the ranking of the reviewer’s own application. See the DPR rules and guidelines in the ‘Supporting documents’ section.
Allocating resources
Following assessment, applications will be allocated to one of three tiers.
Resources will be allocated to the applications in the top tier as priority, using partial randomisation as required.
Applications in the middle tier may be recommended for resources using partial randomisation.
Resources are allocated until the budget is exhausted throughout the middle tier.
Each review pool will have a separate resource budget, as a proportion of the overall resource budget for the opportunity.
Assessment by experts remains the mainstay of the process and applications must pass a certain threshold to be deemed competitively strong against the assessment criteria. Therefore, only highly competitive applications will be considered via randomisation.
The UKRI and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology delivery team will make the final allocation decision.
Assessment criteria
The criteria we will assess your application against are:
- alignment to the funding opportunity’s priority areas and highly credible research outcomes
- the project has a high degree of ambition, novelty or there is a significant opportunity that would not be possible without access to the AIRR
- previous use of GPU compute and demonstration that progress of research is contingent on scaling up access to compute resource
- ethical or responsible research and innovation considerations, including how to manage these considerations
We reserve the right to modify the assessment process as needed.
What happens if you receive an award offer
If your project application is successful, UKRI will send the project lead a formal offer letter, which will contain:
- the award terms and conditions
- any subsidy notice required
- a link to the online equality monitoring form
When you confirm the equality monitoring form has been completed, the project lead will be emailed a project link from the AIRRPortal.
By logging in to the AIRRPortal and accessing the compute resources, you will have accepted the UKRI terms and conditions.
