Exploring Unconscious Bias in Grant Review
The Open & Equitable Model Funding Program, a joint initiative between the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) and the Health Research Alliance (HRA), strives to embed transparent, equitable, and inclusive practices into research funding. As a multifaceted program, we have undertaken a number of activities, including co-developing 32 interventions and action-oriented resources associated to render grantmaking more inclusive throughout its entire cycle, and piloting these interventions with a cohort of 11 funders. A significant consideration in strengthening philanthropic equity is improving the grant review process, which prompted us to partner with PREreview, an organization working to improve the quality and transparency of scholarly peer review. Through this collaboration, our aim was to develop strategies that could enable grant reviewers to navigate and manage the intricacies of their unconscious bias.
We began by developing and organizing two 90-minute live interactive training sessions for grant reviewers (both external and program staff). The turnout and participation from the funder and researcher communities were commendable. However, feedback from these sessions pointed out certain challenges - mainly time constraints and limited bandwidth. Upholding the principles of the Open & Equitable Model Funding Program, which emphasizes removing participation barriers for a fairer scholarship, we adapted. The feedback led us to produce short, digestible video content, ensuring reviewers could access crucial information whenever convenient.
Today, we are pleased to launch this series of videos we co-developed with PREreview. Below, we enumerate the different training videos and briefly describe their content:
Introduction: This video provides an overview of the video series and explains how these resources align with the program's larger objectives.
Introduction to Bias: This video introduces the concept of bias and its role in the context of grant review.
Identifying Bias: This segment aids reviewers in identifying and addressing personal unconscious biases.
Bias Mitigation Strategies for Grant Reviewers: This delivers actionable tips for grant reviewers to reduce bias in the review process.
Bias Mitigation Strategies for Program Staff: This delivers actionable recommendations for program staff and officers to diminish bias manifestations in the review process.
Constructive & Actionable Feedback: This video shares recommendations on providing feedback to applicants to improve the proposal.
Rubrics & Evaluation Criteria: This final segment issues a call to adopt explicit and more objective review criteria and guidelines that encourage more equitable grant evaluations.
The aspiration of transparent, equitable, and inclusive grant review remains central to our program. While these videos serve as a starting point and do not replace comprehensive training, they offer accessible options to study and reflect on unconscious bias. We understand that our learning process is ongoing. We are eager to refine and improve, and your feedback is invaluable in this endeavor. Whether you have thoughts on the video content or format or have other educational resources to share, please reach out at eunice@orfg.org. To access the interactive version of this video collection, we invite you to go to the YouTube repository. Copies of all these videos are also archived and preserved in a Zenodo collection. All this work is openly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License for maximum sharing and reusability. Please acknowledge the Open Research Funders Group and PREreview when reusing these materials.