Please see the below letter received from the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) regarding their “Large Grants Competition”.

Dear Colleague

LARGE GRANTS COMPETITION

In May the ESRC announced a Large Grants competition. As part of the call we invited applicants to submit short Expressions of Interest (EOI), to help us with panel recruitment and peer review arrangements. We have received 122 EOIs. Given that the closing date for the competition is not until mid-October and the EOI phase wasn’t mandatory, we expect the final number of applications to increase further. This level of demand is higher than we anticipated.

Our intention is to make around four awards through the competition. It is therefore important that we manage demand to give applicants a realistic chance of success, and minimise the nugatory effort invested in preparing, submitting and reviewing unsuccessful applications. It is with regret that we have therefore decided to limit the number of applications per institution and also introduce a shortlisting stage.

We have received multiple applications from a number of Research Organisations, probably because at the EOI stage there was no requirement for potential applicants to submit ideas through their research office. However, as you consider the potential development of full proposals, our expectation is that Research Organisations will submit only one application to the competition.

I trust that you will help us maintain the key aims of our demand management strategy which is to focus sector wide effort on only a small number of high quality applications with a genuine chance of receiving funding.

Yours sincerely

Professor Jane Elliott

Chief Executive

Economic and Social Research Council

For more information regarding the ESRC Large Grants Comptetion, please visit the following link.  

http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding/funding-opportunities/large-grants-competition-2016-17/