Research On The Key Issues Of Funding And Management Of The National Natural Science Foundation Of China

The Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) is the main funder of the basic research in China. Nowadays, the issues of ’the peer review for project selection’,’the ongoing projects management’ as well as ’the management of funding results after project completion’in NSFC could be regarded as three critical matters of common concern. Therefore, in this paper, these issues have been taken as the research objects, and the main content and innovative points are as follows:(1) The peer review is an important process in project management of the NSFC. The present researches have revealed some types of the flaw about the peer review, which include the mapping distortion of expert judgment, the description difficulty of incomplete information within the expert judgment, as well as the insufficient differentiation between projects due to the simple quantitative methods of expert judgment. In practice, the peer review cannot easily be approved and understood by the project applicants, and the controversial opinions between experts have adverse impact on the rationality of the NSFC peer review. In order to solve the above problems, the improvements of the NSFC peer review method have been made based on the Evidential Reasoning (ER) rule from the perspective of human cognition in this paper.The whole process of the NSFC proposal review could be divided into two phases. In the first phase, each expert gives the collective opinion about a research proposal based on his or her evaluation on each attribute of the research proposal, such as "the scientific significance of the research". In the second phase, the NSFC combines all the experts’ opinions about the proposal and determine the final conclusion of it. The factors influencing the expert’s cognitive consistency between his/her attribute judgments and collective opinion are identified from the perspective of human cognition, and a self-learning model is structured based on the belief-rule-based (BRB) systems to determine the parameters of influencing factors. Accordingly, the consistent reasoning rules about experts’ attribute evaluation are formed, and the principles to judge the expert’s cognitive consistency and to resolve the controversial opinions between experts are presented. The research shows that experts have diverse preferences between attributes, and the attribute judgments of each expert have different certainty degree. These are two cognitive factors influencing the expert’s opinion of a proposal. The parameters of influencing factors declare that, the experts’attention to the attributes with preference weighs more than their attention to the attribute judgments with certainty. It means that, from the perspective of human cognition, as for the expert’s explanatory idea about the condition of a proposal on each attribute during the peer review, the expert’s normative idea about the relative importance between attributes of different types of projects (such as exploratory projects and applied project) before peer review would become more influential in determining the expert’s collective opinion about the proposal. According to the influencing factors, the weights of consistent reasoning based on the attribute evaluation could be defined. The weights can be used to judge the consistency of expert’s opinions. They also can be used to explain the controversial opinions between experts, which could be decomposed into two parts including the non-consensus due to the different attribute judgments of the experts and the non-consensus due to the distinct weights of the experts. The latter reflects the preferences between different experts, which do not mean that there are conflict views between experts.On the basis of the consistent reasoning, a new method of the NSFC peer review has been proposed, which adopts the expert opinion from consistent reasoning as the evidences, and amends the process of evidence combination with the relative importance and reliability of the corresponding expert opinions. The research has found out, that each expert’s self-assessment of his/her familiarity with a project application could reflect the reliability of his/her opinion about the application. In order to properly use the’familiarity’to measure the reliability of an expert’s opinion, the ER rule is amended in this paper. When the reliability of the opinion is provided by an expert, the importance of the expert’s opinion should also influence the reliability. This amendment can avoid the reliability of the opinion provided by the expert influence the NSFC’s judgment on the importance of the expert’s opinion. The amended ER rule could be generalized to the common situation in which the reliability of evidence is decided by the source of evidence. A numerical study is examined with NSFC real data to demonstrate the applicability of the new peer review method.(2) Currently, the attention to the performance of NSFC from the government and society is increasing prominently. As a consequence, the focus of NSFC performance now has extended from the research outputs to outcomes and impacts, which results in that the intermediate stage from the NSFC fund target to the performance is getting longer. Hence, the implementation of funded projects becomes increasingly important to the NSFC’s performance. On the other hand, the target adjustment in accordance with performance lags behind the actual conditions, exhibit what is known as hysteresis. So the deficiencies and problems of the target have to be found during project implementation. For these purposes, there is an urgent need for improving the ongoing projects management.To promote the funding performance, the management of NSFC ongoing projects can resort to the accountability of projects. Firstly, in this paper the current problem and adverse impacts of the ongoing projects management are concluded based on the field research. Then, the accountability patterns of the current ongoing projects management are analyzed according to the relevant public accountability theories. And in the light of the researches on the human cognitive strategies which adopted to cope with the accountability, the reasons of the current problem and adverse impacts which mentioned above are explained. Finally, on the basis of these analyses, accountability mechanism of the ongoing projects management is constructed.The research has found that, the current accountability function of the ongoing projects management can hardly cover all the demands of performance, including the NSFC performance as well as the project performance, so the concept of ’project quality’ has been defined as the object of accountability to cover all the demands. In addition, the cognitive strategies which adopted by project groups to cope with the accountability are also disadvantageous to the NSFC funding performance, for this reason,’procedural accountability’ has been used to solve this problem. It is thus obvious that the quality accountability mechanism can improve the current NSFC ongoing projects management and enhance the NSFC funding performance.(3) The management of NSFC funding results could promote the development of basic research, and drive the R&D and applied innovation. NSFC has designed the management system of NSFC funding results. Now, its implementation mechanisms should been analyzed to facilitate the system operation.For this goal, a governance mechanism has been presented in this paper. Firstly, the characteristics of the NSFC funding results management are analyzed. Then, by considering the NSFC funding results as a sort of public goods, the governance principles regarding to the ’production’ of the public good, the ’provision’ of it, as well as the relationship between ’production’ and ’provision’are proposed. Finally, taking ’data’ for example, the reasons which cause the current situation of NSFC data sharing are explained. Meanwhile, the practice and experience from home and aboard has been used to illustrate how the governance principles can be realized.Based on the relevant theories about governing the public goods, the research has found out:as for the ’production’ of the public good, the NSFC funding results totally rely on the output from the projects such as the papers, which is significantly different with the natural resources. So the motivation of a project team which could determine the output of project is critical to the results management. On the other hand, as the knowledge accounts for the major proposition of the NSFC funding results, the ’provision’ of the results, such as knowledge sharing, would not lead to the ’physical depreciation’ of them. As a result, the effective use of the results could promote the NSFC performance significantly. However, the external effects of the ’provision’ could lower the earnings and feelings of project teams, and then result in their motivation loss. Based on these findings, the principles governing the ’production’ and ’provision’ of the NSFC funding results have been conducted according to the polycentric governance theory, and the external effects of the ’provision’ has been controlled by principles which derived from the game analyses of the relationship between ’production’ and ’provision’. In order to implement the NSFC funding results management successfully, the management should be guided by these governance principles.