Blind Evaluation method will be used in the 1st stage evaluation of the Horizon Europe Health Cluster (Cluster 1) and Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environment (Cluster 6) 2024 two-stage calls to prevent potential biases in the evaluation process.
Proposals submitted to a call taking part in the blind evaluation pilot must be anonymous: proposals may not contain any direct or indirect reference to the organisations or persons participating in the proposals. This means that participants must not disclose applicants’ organisation names, acronyms, logos nor names of personnel in the Part B of the application (the narrative uploaded as a pdf document). In addition, names of proposers or their organisations should not be potentially identifiable indirectly, via, for instance, links to web pages or through references to their role and previous experience.
The proposal can include references to their own publications if there is no emphasis that the publication is authored by one or more of the proposers. The proposal will be declared inadmissible if its anonymity is not respected in the part B of the application. Information on the identity of participants should be included only in proposal Part A (the structured online web forms).
Examples of statements resulting in inadmissible proposals
- ‘Most of project’s participants have been involved in the previous H2020 project, NANOCOM...’
- ‘For climate impact, we will use greenhouse gas emission intensities, following a methodology developed previously by a project partner (Dalin et al.)’
- ‘This task in WP3 will be based on outputs generated by some participants of the consortium’, (with a link in the footnote to a YouTube video or webpage where participants can be identified)
- ‘The consortium includes the largest research institute in France’
- ‘Partner 3 is the leading company in Spain for wind turbine installation’
- ‘Our current research expands our previous findings described in a recently published article (Wiliam et al, 2022)’
- ‘The consortium consists of leaders in the high tech industry, including the biggest in terms of capital constructor of micro chips ‘
- ‘The coordinator organisation was the one who first introduced the concept of m-RNA in vaccines’