Reviewed: May 2025
AMRC members must use a rigorous expert review process to inform which research to fund.
Our full members must abide by our six principles of expert review in research funding, including response mode and strategic or long term funding investments. To successfully meet these principles you must read the ‘how to achieve’ section for each principle (click on the images below) as well as the summary of definitions.
Charities must ensure the review process is ‘fit for purpose’ with reviews proportionate to both the size and scale of the award and the expertise sought sufficient and relevant to provide effective review. Charities must seek additional review for applications where there is a lack of expertise on a particular subject area on any research review committees or among in-depth reviewers used by the charity, or where the funding requested is substantial in relation to the charity’s research spend.
View our Principle of Proportionality
Charities must take account of advice provided by experts who are independent of the charity’s administrative staff and trustees.
View our Principle of Independence
Charities must seek recommendations from a range of experts with relevant knowledge or experience, who appropriately reflect the views of a range of stakeholders. Charities must also consider the diversity of experts involved in the review process in terms of location, career stage, gender and ethnicity or other factors as appropriate.
View our Principle of Diversity
Charities must rotate the experts involved in decision making to ensure they are regularly incorporating fresh ideas and new perspectives into their expert review processes. This allows charities to incorporate the views of a range of individuals, including those who may not have been otherwise represented. It also allows charities to change the membership of their research review committee(s) as appropriate and required to meet their research strategy.
View our Principle of Rotation
Charities must publish and adhere to a conflicts of interest policy, specific to research funding. This policy must clearly articulate the types of conflicts that may arise in research funding contexts and specify the actions that conflicted committee members should take so that they are not able to influence funding decisions. Additionally, where research funding is awarded to trustees of the charity, this must be done according to the Charity Commission rules in Annex 1, AMRC's conflicts of interest guide, and the charity’s governing documents (e.g. articles of association) must permit this.
View our Principle of Impartiality
Charities must publish their research strategy and expert review process online so that external audiences can see the rigorous methods used to make research funding decisions, including the names of the experts involved in the decision-making process. It is important that charity funders share transparently how and why animals are used in research. When funding research involving animals, charities must consider the 3Rs through expert review.
View our Principle of Transparency
AMRC allows flexibility in how members meet these principles. This takes into consideration the diversity of member charities in size, structure, research area, grant type and funding mechanisms and allows members to individualise and contextualise their expert review processes, using the most appropriate process to support their decision making.
Charities may choose to fund long-term research projects and/or a specific institute, centre, or location to support infrastructure, personnel, or multiple research projects to deliver on the charity’s mission. Click the button below to explore how to apply the principles to long-term review.
Long-term review
The following definitions apply to the principles of expert review.
Experts include individuals with relevant knowledge or experience in a given subject area. Experts can include academic researchers, clinicians, industry representatives and regulators as well as patients, people with lived experience, service users, carers and loved ones, donors of tissues cells and data, and other interested members of the public where appropriate.
To be independent, an expert must not work in the charity or be a trustee of the charity.
Research review committee refers to the expert group used in a standard model of expert review. Others may use the following terms to mean the same thing: research/grants/scientific advisory committee /panel/model of expert review group(s) where appropriate. It can be a fixed committee or bespoke and drawn from a ‘pool/college’ of experts. This equates to step four of the process of expert review outlined in the expert review page.
Long-term is when a charity is funding a project, institute, centre, location or awarding long-term funding to an individual for a period longer than five years, through either single, multiple, or continuous grants.
If you have any questions about this topic or information to share, please get in touch with our Research Policy Manager, Sarah Hartwell ([email protected]).