Reviewer Guidelines

EOSC-Life aims to bring together Research Infrastructures to create an open collaborative space for digital biology. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) wishes to enable ground-breaking research, and to generate new knowledge by linking the scientific life science community to a variety of interdisciplinary data resources and a platform of various data analysis tools. Through these two Internal Calls, the call for sensitive data projects and the call for academia-industry collaborations, EOSC-Life supports projects that will drive the evolution of the Research Infrastructure repository infrastructure for EOSC and integration of the Research Infrastructure repositories.

Reviewers are bound to respect the confidentiality of information provided in an EOSC-Life proposal. Reviewers must not disclose or otherwise exploit this confidential information for any purpose.

  • Reviews should be returned within two weeks.
  • Each evaluation criterion must be scored.
  • If a score is too low for any individual criterion (a score of 1 or less) this will suffice to reject the proposal.
  • A thorough evaluation of the scientific excellence of the proposed work is essential to prioritize proposals, as financial as well as staff resources for support are limited.
  • Because proposals to this call cover a very broad spectrum of life science research areas, reviewers will be assigned based on broad subject area expertise and are expected to review proposals with a high-level view of their excellence, impact and sustainability.

Reviews will be shared in full with the applicant. Reviewer identities will be anonymised. To communicate confidentially with the moderator about a proposal please use the ARIA messaging system via a “contact administrator” button.

 

Proposals should be scored according to the following criteria: 

  • Scientific Excellence (6. Outstanding - top 5% of projects; 5. Excellent - within top 5-10% of projects; 4. Good - within top 10-25% of projects; 3. Average - within top 25-50% of projects; 2. Satisfactory - below top 50% of projects; 1. Poor - within top 50-75% of projects; 0. Not Competitive) - Proposals should be of high scientific quality, with a clearly defined background, innovative goal, and clear scientific impact. In the call for academia-industry collaborations, contributions of the industry collaborator to conceptualization and implementations should be clearly outlined. The significance of the project in the context of international research and standards in the field as well as the relevance of the project to the scientist’s overall scientific work should be considered.

 

  • Impact of the new resources for EOSC and the scientific community (6. Outstanding impact on EOSC and the scientific community - top 5% of projects, 5. Excellent impact - within top 5-10% of projects, 4. Good impact - within top 10-25% of projects, 3. Average impact - within top 25-50% of projects, 2. Satisfactory impact - below top 50% of projects, 1. Poor impact - within top 50-75% of project, 0. No clear impact) - Projects should demonstrate the impact of the resources (infrastructure/data/services/methods) they are making available for the EOSC, the associated Research Infrastructures and scientific communities. In the call for academia-industry collaborations, the level of reciprocal benefits for the company and EOSC-Life partners with the potential for long-term collaboration should be considered.

 

  • Sustainability (3. Comprehensive and fully feasible sustainability plan; 2. Sustainability plan of average quality and feasibility; 1. Poor sustainability plan; 0. No sustainability plan/major issues) - Projects should have a clear plan for the sustainability of the project outcomes beyond the duration of the funding period.