新西兰健康研究理事会探索者项目评审方法对国家自然科学基金原创探索类项目的启示

Introduction of the Evaluation Mechanism for Explorer Grant ofHealth Research Council of New Zealand——Inspiration for Original Exploratory Program of NationalNatural Science Foundation of China

新西兰健康研究理事会(Health Research Council of New Zealand,HRC)隶属于新西兰卫生部,是新西兰资助健康与医学研究的政府机构。为加强对变革性研究的资助,从2013年起HRC推出了探索者项目(Explorer Grant),为科研人员申请常规项目资助提供种子基金支持。与常规评审方法不同的是,该项目采用双盲评审与底线评审方法,可以让评审专家专注于申请课题的变革性特征。这大大降低了评审专家的负担,同时兼有简便、透明与公平等诸多优点。本文建议国家自然科学基金委员会在评审和资助“突出原创”这类同行评议难度较大的项目时,可以借鉴HRC探索者项目的底线评审方法;加强“原创探索类”项目的改革力度,结合中央“揭榜挂帅”政策要求,降低其申请门槛、增强其对常规项目的培育功能;在具体实施过程中可采用本土化策略,引入“是否符合资助标准”的函评环节,而抽签环节可以用多元投入的方法来补充。

Health Research Council(HRC)is a government agency affiliated to the Ministry of Health in New Zealand supporting health and biomedical research.To enhance the support of transformative research at an early stage,HRC initiated Explorer Grant in 2013 to provide researchers with seed funding which would facilitate their applications for regular programs.Different from the regular evaluation process,a combination of double-blind review and random allocation is adopted for Explore Grant to select the proposals to be funded,which helps the reviewers focus on the transformative characteristics of the research.Such process not only reduces the burden on peer reviewers significantly,but also has advantages such as simplicity,transparency and fairness.This paper suggests:inspired by the HRC Explorer Grant,National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC)should explore to integrate random allocation into the evaluation approach for its Original Exploratory Program,which is difficult to select appropriate peer reviewers from a specific area;in accordance with the policy of adopting“open competition mechanism to select the best candidates”,NSFC should improve its Original Exploratory Program by lowering application threshold and developing seed funding support;flexibility and localized strategy could also be introduced,for example,judging the compliance with evaluation criteria may be substituted for scoring,and random allocation may be supplemented by diversified investment.