ORAU Plays a Role in National Hydrogen Fuel Initiative
Imagine a nation virtually free from pollution due to auto emissions, where the greenhouse effect is no longer a major issue, and excessive dependence on foreign oil imports is a thing of the past. Through the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), this could be a reality in this century. The $1.2 billion, five-year plan is already underway with researchers across the nation searching for answers and proposing solutions for hydrogen fuel cell efficiency.
One important question is “how can the government filter through and make sense of all the proposals for this initiative to make the most informed decision on how to allocate federal monies to fund the best research?”
The answer: independent and objective peer and merit reviews to ensure credibility and fairness of proposals. That’s where Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) plays a crucial role in getting these research initiatives off the ground.
In 2004, DOE made a request for grant applications from researchers. More than 200 proposals were received in early January 2005. As DOE’s primary contractor for managing peer and merit reviews, ORAU arranged for a peer review that would culminate in four sets of panel meetings between late February and early April 2005.
The proposals to be reviewed were assigned to ten different panels in the areas of hydrogen storage, membranes for transport, catalysis, solar hydrogen, and bio-inspired hydrogen. Ninety-five independent reviewers, experts in directly related fields, were selected by DOE. Once the selections were made, ORAU quickly put into place a plan to conduct and manage the actual peer reviews.
Unique to ORAU, the PeerNet system was employed to expedite the process of collecting preliminary comments and funding recommendations from reviewers from throughout the U.S. and other countries. PeerNet is a Web-based, password-protected application that provides electronic distribution of research proposals to reviewers, collects reviewer comments and ratings on the proposals, and reports the evaluations assigned to the proposals by reviewers.
With the goal of obtaining the most credible and unbiased feedback on the proposals, ORAU also managed reviewer conflicts of interest for the panel meetings. This ensured that any reviewer who had identified a potential conflict was not in a panel room for any discussion of that proposal and thus provided a conducive environment for confidentiality and rigorous professional discussions.
To maintain the integrity of the peer review process, ORAU also provided technical advice on ways to ensure compliance with federal regulations and Office of Science peer review policy as needed.
As a result of this process and through the use of the PeerNet system, at the conclusion of each panel meeting, ORAU could immediately provide the customer with reports of complete reviewer comments and a rank-order list of funding recommendations.
In the end, this enabled the customer to make funding decisions in time for a May 25, 2005, announcement in which DOE’s Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman granted 70 awards totaling $64 million to universities, national laboratories, and private industry to advance hydrogen research and achieve the goal of having practical and cost-effective fuel-cell vehicles available to the American public by 2020.