My two cents on this.CountZ wrote: ↑Wed Feb 13, 2019 10:49 amHi again everyone
We are writing a complaint to the Commission about unfair evaluation processes, but we need your help.
If you think that the evaluation is unfair, please tell us why. Maybe you got a much lower score on re-submission. Maybe you don't think your proposal should have received the high/low score it did. The goal is the get the Commission to rethink its evaluation process, so as to make this less of a lottery, and instead to reward the best proposals.
You cannot fight against unfair (or perceived as unfair, which is a very important nuance) reviews with limited review time and multiple reviewers. If you believe it was unfair, as stated by the EC "you may request an ‘evaluation review’ on the procedural aspects of the evaluation (not the merits of your proposal)". I did it for what I considered being an unfair review two years ago, it did not change anything. Unfair, yes, but that's the name of the game.
What is quite different, in my opinion, is getting a much lower score on re-submission. Here it shows that basically the full evaluation process is flawed, and that the full thing is a lottery (actually, some authors have suggested using a partial lottery system, see eg Gross & Bergstrom 2019 PLOS Biology).
If you want to follow the op-ed route, the second phenomenon appears more problematic to me (differences of more than 20% in the final mark from the same starting material???). The first one is trivial: of course you may get conflicting reviews depending on the level of expertise of the reviewers within the panel. Still, if you want to discuss this "unfairness", is the number of evaluation reviews asked per year available? This could be a good indicator. Another thing to keep in mind: for one unfair review, how many fair ones? And which ratio is acceptable?