The funding scheme “Impact innovation” - The idea behind and the results of an assessment

Abstract

Researchers increasingly recognise that data-sharing, improved data management and the availability of research data infrastructures serves the effectiveness of the science system. Funding agencies support this cause and react to it. The German Research Foundation (DFG) designed the funding programme “Information Infrastructures for Research Data” to address this need. The programme was evaluated in 2019 in respect to the long-term success and sustainability of the funded projects. The full study contains funding statistics, a descriptive content analyses of review panel protocols and qualitative case studies. For the content analysis, an in-house team at the DFG coded the content of review group protocols for 158 programme applications. An expert commission accompanied the original evaluation and offered recommendations for the further development of the programme. This article builds on this study and adds a statistical analysis of the programme specific funding decision based on the original data of the content analysis of review panel protocols. Which criteria are decisive for funding selection? The multivariate analysis of the funding decision models the outcome of the grant peer review under consideration of the arguments and assessments made by the review panels. The results show that the assessed quality of the research plan has the strongest effect on the funding decision. This is in line with other studies on peer review criteria. More programme-specific is the conclusion that the scientific demand for the planned research data infrastructures has a marked impact on the funding decision, too. An unexpected result is the low importance of the institutional environment for the final funding decision.