Results of the March 2011 Operating Grants Competition

(2011-06-30) On behalf of CIHR, I am pleased to announce the results of the spring 2011 Open Operating Grants competition, in which CIHR approved the investment of $240.2 million over five years. As with previous competitions, we met our on-going commitment to the research community to fund at least 400 grants from the core competition budget and to maintain or increase the average value of these grants. In addition approximately 60 full term and bridge grants are expected to be funded through Priority Announcements and other sources for a total of 460 grants approved from the Operating Grant 2010-2011 (March) competition. The average (mean) annual core competition grant size was $600,470 (median grant size of $592,298) with an average duration of 4.19 years.

As with the ARCHIVED - Results of the March 2010 Open Operating Grants Competition, the March 2011 competition marked the second time that the Open Operating Grants competition dedicated a part of the Open Operating Grants budget to a specific funding envelope - worth approximately $12.5 million - for large grants, including large RCTs. Three large grants with an average total grant size of $4.1M were funded in this competition. Applications that were within the top 0.5% of peer review committee recommended average annual budgets were ranked together and funded from the top down within the available funding envelope. Other facts and frequently asked questions relating to the Open Operating Grant Program are available on the CIHR website, in the document ARCHIVED – CIHR Open Operating Grant Program, Competitions Frequently Asked Questions.

The results of this funding competition represent positive news for the research community and for all Canadians – the people who will ultimately benefit from the results of the research we fund.

Looking ahead, it seems clear that we will continue to be challenged by our own success in building a vibrant, creative and highly competitive health research community. We do have some concerns about the funding process. We know that a tremendous amount of effort is required to prepare an application. We also appreciate the many months of work dedicated by over 860 reviewers to evaluate these applications. The increase in number of applications – especially in those that are essentially resubmissions of unsuccessful applications – represents a growing concern for our peer reviewers. Consequently, we intend to ask researchers to submit only their most competitive applications. Conversely, we discourage researchers from immediately resubmitting unsuccessful applications to the next competition with no change or reflection. As well, we suggest that after an application has been unsuccessful 2 or 3 times that it not be resubmitted.

We encourage these voluntary measures in the hope that the research community and the institutions that CIHR supports will work with us to manage the volume of work required by your peers to review and rank applications.

I wish to congratulate the recipients of March 2011 Open Operating Grants and wish them success in all their research endeavours.

Kelly VanKoughnet
Acting Chief Scientific Officer and Vice-President, Research
Canadian Institutes of Health Research