How to become an expert evaluator?
If you want to be an expert that evaluates proposals do this:
Go to the participant portal:
http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/experts/index.html
Register and get an ECAS account. This is a personal account as you work as a private person. Do not use an id from your organization. When you have got the account info on mail log in.
You will put in information about:
- Personal detail and contact detail
- The languages you speak, write and read
- Education
- Specialist fields (from a list)
- Open keywords
- Employment history
- Experience
- As EC Evaluator/reviewer
- Any other review or evaluation experience
- Publications and achievements
This does not take long. You probably have all info available already.
What you will do as an expert
Working as an expert is an inspiring and useful experience. You learn a lot about how the EC research administration work, about the evaluation process and about how you yourself can improve your proposal writing. You will also get an overview of your expert area by reading what your European fellow researchers have written in their proposals. You will also meet interesting people in the evaluation meetings.
When you have registered:
- You are one of 60 000 experts in the EC database and you can just wait
- Depending on your field and competence you may be selected for a job
- If you are selected for a job you must be able to say yes on short notice. Otherwise the next on the list will get the job
- If you accept the job, you sign a personal contract with the EC
Payment:
- As it is a personal contract you will be paid to your own bank account and you need and IBAN number
- Payment is:
- €450 for a full work day
- €100 per night for accommodation
- €92 in daily allowance
- You are responsible for paying tax
The work:
- You will get an introduction and briefing on how to do the job online
- Reading proposal at home and scoring them
- Normally estimated to 1 to 5 days of work
- Going to Brussels for consensus and panel meetings
- 1 to 3 days
In the consensus meeting the scores and the comments from the individual evaluators (5-6 person) shall be merged to a single evaluation report that all must agree to. In these meetings there may be hard discussions about the scores so you should be prepared to defend your individual scores. This is also the most fun part of the work. You do not agree on an average but on scores that all will accept.
In the panel meeting all reports form the consensus meetings are taken together and the proposal are ranked from top to bottom. Even if all formal criteria has been applied there may still be proposals with the same score and ranking. It is the up to the panel to agree on additional criteria for the final ranking.
After the evaluation is finished a letter is sent to the applicants informing about if they are funded, on the waiting list or not funded. Together with the letter the applicants get an Evaluation Summary Report with a summary of the text you and the other experts agreed upon in the consensus meetings.
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