ATMO-ACCESS D7.3 Recommendations for Proposal Evaluation for a Competitive, Fair and Effective Access Programme in a Distributed RI

The ATMO-ACCESS project aims to develop sustainable processes for efficient and effective provision of access to distributed atmospheric research infrastructures (RIs). With a goal to provide guidelines and recommendations for governance, management and funding (see D8.1 and D8.2), ATMO-ACCESS seeks to investigate, pilot and implement suitable mechanisms for sustainable access provision. Accepting that any such mechanism will involve the proposal of access activities, to maintain high standards and foster excellence, the assessment and evaluation of proposals must be central to the provision, whatever form they may take. Robust evaluation is necessary for several reasons, though fundamentally the driver is the optimum distribution of finite resource. ATMO-ACCESS work package 7 (WP7) was designed, constructed and implemented to deliver an effective programme of trans-national and virtual access (TNA-VA). As a measure of the success of WP7, the access programme itself was subjected to two evaluations. The interim evaluation was conducted midway through the project and reported in Deliverable D7.1, with the final programme evaluation reported in D7.2. To supplement the programme evaluations, it was recognised that an assessment of the proposal evaluation process was provided in the form of the current supplementary deliverable D7.3 to describe the means whereby the programme was constructed to be competitive, fair, effective and transparent. There are many competing tensions in the formulation of evaluation criteria and processes, explored and outlined in the context section below.