Official languages in peer review

CIHR continues to take steps to ensure linguistic barriers are removed at the peer review stage:

• We translate one-page research summaries of applications submitted in French in advance of committee meetings
• We are actively recruiting bilingual and Francophone peer reviewers (currently, approximately 26% of CIHR peer reviewers have capacity to review in French)
• We encourage reviewers to write and present their reviews in their official language of choice
• We translate reviews in cases where they are submitted in the opposite official language of the application (i.e., reviews written in English are translated into French for French applications and reviews written in French are translated into English for English applications)
• We have been piloting simultaneous interpretation services in peer review meetings for select peer review committees and will be extending this pilot as we continue to refine the process to make it as seamless as possible
• In CIHR’s largest funding program, the Project Grant competition, we equalize success rates for French language applications. That means that we ensure that the proportion of French-language applications funded is at least equal to the proportion of French-language applications submitted to the competition. A separate pot of money is reserved for this equalization.

Date modified:

2024-01-30