ESRC grants administration

As part of the Research Councils' drive to improve efficiency and effectiveness, the ESRC’s grants administration transferred to the RCUK Shared Services Centre (SSC) using a new back-office grants processing system in February 2011.

SSC is now the primary point of contact for all queries regarding the processing of proposals, peer review of individual proposals and administration of current awards. If you have any queries about peer review requests sent to you, please now contact the SSC at grantsesrc@ssc.rcuk.ac.uk, telephone: 01793 867125.

Peer review forms and reviewer scoring scales

We changed our peer review forms in 2011.

• Reviewer scoring scales (PDF, 115Kb)

Classification of your expertise on Je-S

Part of the cross-council harmonisation process is the introduction of a new cross-council research classification scheme. If you have not already done so you are requested to enter your Je-S account to update your expertise details against the new scheme as soon as possible.

The harmonised classification structure operates within a series of levels. For disciplinary and subject expertise this works as follows:

• Level 1 - Research Discipline (Research Area): eg, Law and Legal Studies
  
• Level 2 – Sub-discipline (Research Topic): eg, Socio-legal Studies
  
• Level 3 – Key words (Keys): terms which define more precisely the subject area of the research proposal or expertise of a peer reviewer, eg Human Rights. 

Please note that for ESRC Level 3 is not currently fully populated. However, please feel free to use the ‘free text’ section to give more details of your areas of expertise. You can also classify your areas of expertise through the ‘Qualifiers’ section, which covers such things as specific methodologies utilised.