The award committee comprises scholars and scientists employed at a university or a non-university research institution in Austria. The committee members are nominated by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
The selection process takes approx. 4-5 months. The selected award winners will be informed in writing after the decision of the award committee (usually in mid-July).
Legal recourse is excluded.
Selection Criteria
The main selection criterion is the excellence of the applicant's current and past research as well as their plans for future research. The applicant's scientific qualifications, the innovative content and methodology of the current and future research approaches and the feasibility of the planned project will be assessed.
Selection Procedure
The applications are assigned to the members of the award committee according to their fields. Great attention is paid to avoiding potential conflicts of interest. Hence committee members and applicants may not work at the same university or research institute. Furthermore, professional or private relations or rivalry are also taken into consideration.
Preliminary Selection
In the first selection round, the award committee decides which applications will be sent for external review. If the committee is of the view that an application does not fulfil the criteria of the funding programme, it will be rejected.
For the applications that are to be reviewed externally, the committee members propose suitable reviewers who are active abroad. Strict attention is paid to reasons of bias or possible conflicts of interest.
There is no set pool of reviewers; for each application, experts are sought who can assess the application on the basis of their own academic experience or research activities in accordance with the international standards in the field in question. These reviewers work on a voluntary basis, i.e. they do not receive any final compensation for their work.
Applicants have the right to exclude up to three experts from the review process (e.g. due to rivalry or to dispute between schools) without giving reasons.
Review Procedure
At least one review is obtained for each application. In the case of interdisciplinary applications covering several fields of research, this number can be increased.
A review consists of a written statement and a formal assessment of the academic qualification of the applicant and aspects of the research project on a scale from 1–10 (1–2 = inadequate, 9–10 = outstanding):
Finally, the reviewers are requested to provide a summarized recommendation as to whether the application is fully worthy of funding or should be rejected.
If the written statement is not conclusive, another review will be sought. The reviewers are requested to state potential conflicts of interest. If conflict of interest is established retrospectively, the review is not taken into consideration.
Decision on the Awards
The decision on the selection of award winners is made at the committee meeting. On the basis of the reviews, the members of the committee rank the applications assigned to them and present them to the committee. The applications are dealt with in comparison with one another; the reviews, but also other criteria (such as publication performance, mobility, etc) as well as the significance of the award for the applicant's further career are discussed in detail.
The decision on granting the awards is made by the entire committee.
