Find out how we fund high-quality scientific research based on peer review.

Key players in the peer review process

Telethon peer review process is modelled on the system used by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. federal agency for biomedical research and it is Quality ISO9001 certified. This process  is based on two players with fundamental, separate roles:

  • Research programme managers (PMs) at the Telethon Research Office manage the entire process, from preparing the call for proposals to submitting the final review report on the evaluation procedure. They are responsible for selecting the reviewers with the best expertise in each research field, i.e., the scientists who will evaluate the projects, and for organising evaluation sessions;
  • the Scientific and Medical Committee (SMC) plays a key role in Telethon’s evaluation process, with the support of two external reviewers selected specifically for each research project.
Scientific Committee Meeting, Novembre 2022

The stages of the evaluation process:

Stage 1: Initiation and validation

The PMs oversee the announcement of the competitive call, examine and validate the applications received, excluding those that do not meet eligibility criteria or are not relevant to the mission of Telethon.

Stage 2: Triage (optional)

For several funding initiatives a Triage phase may be applied This initial assessment is performed by the members of the Medical and Scientific Committee chosen by the PMs to evaluate the scientific merit of the projects. Three members of the SMC are assigned to each project and according to their scores the projects are  then ranked.. Only top ranking ones proceed in the selection process.

Stage 3: Full Review

After the Triage Phase if applied or soon after call closure, projects are evaluated by three members of the MSC (the same who evaluated in the Triage if done).  with the eventual support of external reviewers selected by the PMs. The external reviewers are foreign scientists, or Italian scientists who do not work in Italy, who have no conflicts of interest with respect to the project to be evaluated. For each competition, Telethon contacts reviewers in its existing database, which currently comprises around nine thousand experts, as well as new experts identified in the scientific literature of reference. The PMs select the external reviewers to guarantee a specific and detailed assessment of the topic of the proposed research project. At the end of this evaluation phase the projects are ranked on the basis of the scores assigned by the reviewers.

Stage 4: Plenary discussion

The final decision to fund projects is made during the plenary meeting of the Medical and Scientific Committee. The proposed projects compete against each another and they are presented by the members of the Committee who evaluated them in the previous phase; then the debate is open to all Committee members. This discussion among colleagues is a means for reducing the errors, oversights or any positive or negative bias by the reviewers. In addition to scientific merit, which is the main evaluation criterion, the Committee also considers the direct or potential impact of the proposed projects on patients’ quality of life, or whether they might make useful contributions to the development or improvement of a therapy or method of diagnosis.

At the end of the plenary discussion, a ranking is drawn up considering the scores expressed by all the members of the CMS. Starting from the projects that are higher in the ranking, it is agreed with the CMS which projects can be funded based on the availability of funds.

Stage 5: Funds approval

The Board of Directors of Telethon meets to allocate funds, following the ranking suggested by the Medical and Scientific Committee, in line with the available budget.

Stage 6: Final review report

For each project submitted, the PMs at the Telethon Scientific Office draw up a document summarizing the selection process carried out, which also includes the reviewers’ anonymized written comments and a summary of the discussion. This review report is important because guarantees the transparency of the system and is a training tool for the researcher who submitted the application.

Il tuo browser non è più supportato da Microsoft, esegui l'upgrade a Microsoft Edge per visualizzare il sito.