With regards to the decision of the Georgian Constitutional Court dated as of March 27, 2017, on the evaluation process of submitted proposals, confidentiality of reviewers recruited by SRNSF, the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation communicates the following:

Constitutional Court’s decision alters the working principles of the foundation, containing risk to hamper the robust, unbiased, high quality evaluation process within Georgia’s STI system. It also creates barriers to international collaboration and cooperation with individual experts worldwide.

SRNSF practice shows that, in case of revealing the identification, international and local scientists tend to deny to evaluate proposals.

It is noteworthy, that experts’ confidentiality remains the key principle of proposal evaluation to the world’s lending national and international science foundations.

Since 2016 Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation cooperates with the US National Science Foundation (NSF) affiliated organization – Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF Global) and Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) in terms of evaluating three major calls of SRNSF:  Fundamental research, Applied Research and Collaborative research grants with participation of compatriots residing abroad.  Based on the agreement with the above mentioned organizations, reviewers’ identity is not disclosed and remains confidential.

In addition, since 2015, SRNSF publishes names of recruited reviewers in alphabetical order. This is a common practice for the European Research Council (ERC) programs and is certainly a step forward to demonstrate SRNSF transparency and accountability towards the society.

Abstract from the decision of the Constitutional Court of Georgia