Conflicts of interest guidance for committee members and peer reviewers

You have a conflict of interest that prevents you from reviewing a grant application if you:

1. Are the Lead Applicant, Joint Lead Applicant, Co-investigator or Collaborator on the grant application, even if you are a minor collaborator or someone who has provided a letter of support. If an individual is a lead applicant or joint lead applicant on an application, that individual will also be excluded from considering any other applications that directly compete for funding;

2. Are based at the same institution as the Lead Applicant or Joint Lead Applicant, or have been in the previous 12 months (even if you don’t know the individual personally);

   • Being at the same institution as a Co-Investigator is not automatically treated as a conflict, but should still be disclosed and may need to be treated as a conflict on a case-by-case basis if there is a risk of perceived bias (for example if you have collaborated with the Co-Investigator).

3. Have substantively collaborated with the Lead Applicant or Joint Lead Applicant in the previous 3 years, in the sense of providing intellectual input into a project;

   • Co-publication will generally indicate collaboration, but there may be exceptions, for example where a paper acknowledges a significant number of contributing authors who have not collaborated on the work in a substantive sense.

4. Are a relative of the Lead Applicant, Joint Lead Applicant, Co-Investigator or Collaborator;

5. Are a business partner of a Lead Applicant, Joint Lead Applicant, Co-Investigator of Collaborator, or have a financial interest in the grant application;

6. Are in a supervisory relationship with the Lead Applicant or Joint Lead Applicant (now or in the previous 5 years);

7. Have any other relationship which could compromise, or cause a reasonably-informed outsider to doubt, the objectivity of the evaluation of the grant application.