ÌÇÐÄVlog

The Joint Infrastructure Fund will soon award Pounds 100 million or more of contracts. Julia Hinde reports

Universities the country over could soon be transformed into building sites as the first Joint Infrastructure Fund contracts are awarded.

This week's meeting of the fund's joint executive committee was expected to see the first Pounds 100 million or so of the Pounds 700 million JIF fund handed out. Universities should learn next week who the winners are.

Around 200 bids, ranging from Pounds 750,000 to Pounds 25 million, were submitted to the first round of the scheme announced as part of last year's comprehensive spending review. This was for everything from equipment, to new medical research centres and telescopes.

With Pounds 300 million from the Wellcome Trust, Pounds 300 million from the Office of Science and Technology and a further Pounds 100 million from the ÌÇÐÄVlog Funding Council for England, the JIF scheme will inject huge and much-needed money into repairing, refitting and building new university laboratories and research infrastructure.

Though the scheme will operate over three years with five submission deadlines, universities have been keen to get in at the outset, with some concern that the coffers may run dry. Some universities have submitted multiple bids to the first round, including Oxford which has put in eight schemes and Sheffield with nine.

Applications in the biological and medical sciences have been submitted to the Wellcome Trust, while physical science submissions, of which there have been about 130 in the first round, have gone to individual research councils. Each of the bids was then put out for international peer review.

Yale University immunologist Richard Flavell, chairman of the international scientific advisory board looking at the biomedical applications for the Wellcome Trust arm, said of the bids: "As in most grant applications, there was spread. There were maybe 10 to 20 per cent of applications which were truly outstanding, while 40 per cent were very good; the rest were of various levels."

The joint executive committee - chaired by the director general of the research councils, John Taylor, with Mike Dexter, director of Wellcome, as deputy, and the chief executives of the research and funding councils as members - brings the two arms of the scheme together.

At this week's meeting, the committee considered 135 of the most highly rated bids (including 33 on the Wellcome side) which have been ranked by the reviewers. The remainder have been rejected on scientific grounds or a decision deferred until more information can be gathered. There will be almost no opportunity for those that fail to reapply despite the considerable cost in time and money of preparing a bid.

Speaking in advance of the meeting, Dexter said the trust was pleased with the quality of the bids so far. "I think the community has listened to what we have said and has submitted after due consideration."

He said the joint executive committee would be looking at the proposals and the quality of the science, but also strategic issues might come into play. "If there are three or four applications for what is clearly a UK national facility and if the country only needs one we would have to look locally at the science base and other matters," he said.

With the deadline for applications for the second round of the competition falling today, Dr Dexter stressed that JIF was a competition of five rounds. "We still see this as the second of five rounds. We do not foresee any problems of having enough money for the five rounds.

"We have always stressed the scientific quality of bids and how universities should get this right. Resubmissions will be rare. We encourage universities not to think simply of the short-term remedial work but also how this could work in the medium and longer term."