NSERC Allocation Exercise

NSERC is engaged in the exercise of adjusting the allocation of funds between its 30 or so Grant Selection Committees. The purpose of this exercise is to ``provide more flexibility to fund disciplines according to changing needs''. This adjustment will first affect the budgets of the Grant Selection Committees in the 1995-96 fiscal year, i.e. the grants that are applied for this fall. The reallocation is a zero-sum game: 5-10% of each GSC's budget will be held back to be placed in a common pool. The funds in the pool will then be distributed back to the GSCs on the basis of four criteria: overall quality of research, relative cost of research, training of highly qualified personnel, and discipline dynamics (rate of growth, emerging areas, and national interest). This exercise is to be repeated every three years.

As part of the exercise, each GSC is required to submit an Allocation Report that describes the quality of the research in its community and comments on the other criteria listed above. The writing of this report washandled by Bill Harris (1992-93) and me (1993-94).

The report from the Space and Astronomy GSC is available by anonymous ftp from the address ftp.cita.utoronto.ca. Login as ``anonymous'', give your e-mail address as password, change directory to cita/scott/allocation. The postscript file of the report is dis.ps. If you prefer TeX then get the files dis.tex and halfmacro.tex (a macro file).

If you have any problem with this procedure, contact me at tremaine@mail.ast.cam.ac.uk (until December 31, 1994) or tremaine@cita.utoronto.ca. As a last resort, I can send you a paper copy by snail mail.

Finally, on behalf of the GSC I would like to thank the many members of CASCA who contributed comments, ideas, information, statistics, and better writing than my own.

Scott Tremaine

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Please e-mail any suggestions/comments to Jack Penfold (jpenfold@mtroyal.ab.ca)