Introduction

An online application and review system is used for receiving and processing applications for resources offered by the Fenix research infrastructure through the calls for HBP members and neuroscientists. Note that the call for European scientists from all research domains is handled through a different system.

This is a quick guide to support technical and scientific experts in the review process. The project management office of the ICEI project, which realizes the Fenix infrastructure, is available in case of issues or questions: icei-coord@fz-juelich.de

Logging in

The login to the review system is handled via a callback mechanism:

1. Visit https://jards-ebrains.fz-juelich.de/jards/WEB/review/login.php and click on “Login”. Note that this URL is different from the URL used by the applicants.
2. Enter your email address and click on “callback”. Before the first application is assigned to you for review, your (institutional) email address will be manually added to the system by the ICEI PMO. You will be notified by email if an application is assigned to you for review. Please use the same email address, through which you have received this notification, to login.
   
3. You should have received an email with the subject “Review system identification” from noreply@fenix-ri.eu. Click on the link in the email or copy-paste it into the address field of your internet browser.
4. Now you are on the start page of the review server.
5. You can always get back to this start page by clicking on “Overview” in the top left corner.
   

Note that you will be automatically logged out after 120 minutes of inactivity. To re-enter the review portal, follow the above described steps again with the same email address that was used in the first place.

More information and help

More detailed information on how to use the online review system are available through the “Help” button in the top menu. A click on the “(i)” info icon next to a field also leads to a page with additional information.

Reviewing an application

Proposals are always reviewed by a technical expert of each site hosting resources that are requested in this proposal. The technical assessment focuses on technical viability of the project. If a proposal requests a significant amount of resources, it is also reviewed by scientific experts following the established peer review principles. More details about this process are available from the call texts of the respective call.

The main steps and most important options are the same for technical and scientific experts; only the topics to be covered in the assessments are different. Therefore, this guide will use the technical assessment as an example for both.

Information available on the start page

Theoretically, an expert can be responsible for the technical assessment in one case and for the scientific assessment of another proposal. The table at the bottom of the start page gives an overview how many proposals in which category are waiting for your review.

In this example, there are two pending reviews in the category “EBRAINS-TEC”, i.e. technical assessments of two applications are requested.

At the top of the page, all proposals open for review will be displayed. It is possible to switch between the categories “technical review” and “scientific review” by clicking on “Category” in the top menu, to only get one of the two displayed (if there are applications in both available to you).

The main part of the start page lists all applications, for which a review is requested from you:

It is possible to configure the columns displayed by clicking on “Show/hide/move columns”. To get back to the original settings, click on “Config” and “reset table layout config”. It is also possible to export the table configuration and to load it again in future sessions. However, in most cases the standard table layout should work just fine and we recommend not to change it.

Downloading/viewing an application

In the table “Collection of your applications to review” (see above), you can click on “show pdf” in the column “Merged documents”.

Your browser will now open a PDF or offer to download it, depending on your browser configuration. This PDF contains the entire application with all details entered by the applicant, including a single PDF that the applicant may have submitted together with the application to provide further information.

To view the application in a nicely formatted way directly in the browser, click on “(i) details” in the column “Project details”. You might need to scroll to the right to see this column.

On following project details page, you can also view or download the PDF mentioned above. In addition, you can scroll down to the bottom of this page to directly view the application in the browser in a nicely formatted manner with multiple pages, which looks similar to when the applicant has created it. This might be the preferred way to look at the application for some reviewers. To reach this view, click on “(i) show” next to “App data”. This application details page will also be available again directly from the review page for the respective application.

Filling the review form

In the table “Collection of your applications to review” on the start page, click on “edit review” in the first column “Review” to start the actual review.

The first icon displayed next to it shows the status of the respective application:

After having clicked on “edit review”, the page will open, in which the actual review should be done. In the following, we are going to show screenshots of the technical review, but it works the same way for the scientific one, just with different questions to be answered.

At the top of the page, you will see some instructions. Please read them first and follow them carefully.

Underneath these instructions, the application details are again displayed, see the instructions above on how to open or download the full application. Above this, you will also see if review data has already been stored yet.

This section is followed by the questions to be answered for every review. At the bottom, there is also a section “Feedback not shared with applicants”, which can be used as well, e.g. to suggest to the allocation committee which additional information should be requested from the applicant before approving the application. For technical reasons, this field is mandatory. You can simply write “None”, if there is no such feedback.

You can save (and reset) your review at the bottom of the page and continue working on it later on. Only once the tick box “Review Completed” has been checked and the “Save” button was clicked (again) afterwards, the review is completed and submitted for the next step in the allocation process.

If you have saved a review without ticking this box, the following message will be displayed at the top:

Exchanging comments on an application

It is possible to comment on an application, e.g. to send a note to the ICEI Project Management Office (which organizes the allocation process), without including this information directly in the review, or to communicate something to the other reviewers. A reason for this could be that certain information in the proposal are missing, which are needed before the review can be finalised. The ICEI PMO could in this case get in contact with the applicant to request the additional information.

The table “Collection of your applications to review” has the column “Comments”, through which a new comment can be posted.

After clicking on “Add”, the following page allows to list and add comments:

In the above example, a test comment was already posted beforehand by the same account.

Every reviewer comment can be seen by all other technical and scientific reviewers of this application. The displayed names of the authors of the comments will be anonymized. The coordination of the review process (i.e. the ICEI PMO) is allowed to view the comments along with the original names of the comments' authors. They can also add comments visible only to other administrators or decide to show comments to the reviewers, if needed. Comments are not visible to the applicants.

Once a comment has been posted, it is also displayed directly in the table on the start page:

In this particular example the author’s name is not anonymized, because the comment was posted by the currently logged in account.