1. Impressions of a Belgian evaluator for COST
Patricia Mergen
Royal Museum of Central Africa
Meise Botanic Garden

2. Liaison Officer
Quite a nice Fairy Tale Job !

3. BUT

4. When is the Africamuseum opening again ?

5. Background Information
Country of Origin : Luxembourg
University of Namur :
Master in Biology (Topic Paleo-ecology, fossil reefs along the Meuse River)
PHD in Biology (Freshwater Ecology, Distribution of Fish in Reservoir lakes in Belgium and Luxembourg )
: Belgian Biodiversity Information Facility (now under Belgian Biodiversity Platform) at the ULB-VUB
2005 – : Royal Museum for Central Africa with regular sub-contracting to Botanic Garden Meise (currently ½ time)

6. Work experience
Biodiversity Information projects and training provider
Identifying funding opportunities
Supporting in project proposals writing
Supporting management of ongoing projects
Representing the institutions in national and international bodies (advisory, think tanks, decision making )
Presentation of outcomes and activities of the institutions or projects at various events

7. Evaluator expertise
Independent evaluator for EU FP6, FP7, H2020, Marie Curie Fellowships, COST proposals
Independent reviewer to follow up ongoing EU projects in FP7, H2020
Evaluation of bilateral projects with Poland, Norway …
Evaluator for foundations such as IFS (International Foundation for Sciences), JRS Biodiversity grants, GBIF calls for proposals, …
Official or informal advisory in follow up committees of ongoing projects
Independent expert in different groups at EU level, national or regional level (think tanks on next programs, calls, evaluation procedures … )

8. Evaluator expertise (cont)
Main contact for the external evaluation of scientific outputs of the Royal Museum for Central Africa
Close collaboration with EU National Contact points (NCPs) of Belgium and helpdesks at EU level, Testing the Participant portal ….
Chair of the Belgian National Task Force for ESFRI proposal DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections)
Member of international associations such as Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), Training provider and mentor for European GBIF project BID (Biodiversity Information for Development)

9. General added value to be evaluator
Informed of latest state of the art in your domain or related domains
Better understanding of the expectations of the funding bodies
Better understanding of the procedures, online tools, what to fill in, into the many forms
Better understanding on how to manage a project
Better understanding of financial management and reporting requirements, budget allocations and usage of the funding
Better understanding of distribution of tasks and how to do the reporting of the deliverables.

10. Experience with COST
Review Panel Member for Belgium in the domain Natural Sciences
Acted as Evaluator in 2015
Had 9 proposals to check in my panel
Two evaluators assigned to each proposal
Other evaluators in the same panel also had 9-10 proposals to check

11. Remote evaluation Agree who is rapporteur
You do not evaluate the proposals themselves, but check for each proposal the reviews of each of the 3 evaluators + the consensus report
Produce a review panel report
Clear instructions provided via Evaluators Guide and Review Panel members’ Guide, yet remaining challenging

12. Actually more work then evaluating proposals directly !

13. Remote evaluation challenges (procedures)
Read 9 proposals + those in your panel (even if you do not have to evaluate them in view of the local consensus panel meeting in Brussels)
For each proposal 13 questions, 3 evaluators + consensus report
You have to respect the opinion of the evaluators and cannot change the points given, even if you do not agree with their analysis
Check the wording, spelling if it is clear, rewrite some parts of the evaluation reports but not the meaning.
Check if things are said that are not in the proposal but inferred (may need to remove)
Check for improper or prone to be taken as insulting language ..
For some proposals reviewers did not produce a consensus report because they could not come to an agreement, in these cases the review panel has to produce the consensus report

14. Onsite evaluation in Brussels
Over 4 days , good collaboration with COST Association staff, very helpful.
Introduction and guidelines on the procedures and ranking to achieve by the end of the meeting.
Meeting in review panels by domain (Natural Sciences) and we go through all proposals one by one. The rapporteur orally summarizes the review panel report and detected issues are discussed, text modifications approved, amended or rejected.
Decisions on go or no go are agreed.
Hence the competition only highly ranked proposals will actually be funded in practice.
At the end of the process a general debriefing is held collecting feedback from the reviewers.

15. General challenges
Some evaluators have a hard time to follow the guidelines …
Many evaluation reports are very good and clear
Some are very long and difficult to summarize, go beyond the evaluation and add interpretations that are not in the proposal
Some are too short or unclear (for example they answer just yes or no but without detailing much why, or say that applicants failed to meet all criteria, or forgot important stakeholders, users, but without saying which)
Experts in the review panel expressed frustrations that they could not modify the marks or have a different opinion than the evaluators of the proposal, but this rule has to be accepted …
In some case it would have been really useful to contact the evaluators to ask them what they meant, but this is not foreseen in the process even if it could be done without breaching the anonymity of the evaluators and reviewers
Did not encounter any reports with improper language.

16. Why did I not review any COST since 2015 ?
Conflict of Interest !!!
Yeah! We are renovating , but remain very active and every 6 months both the Royal Museum for Central Africa and the Meise Botanic Garden were partners to COST proposals in Natural Sciences.
Check out :

17. Thank you for your
Attention !
Any Questions ?