Eligibility check

(i) The UKF Secretariat verifies that proposals meet the eligibility criteria referred to in the call. These criteria are rigorously applied and any proposal found to be ineligible is excluded from evaluation. The eligibility check is carried out before the beginning of the evaluation process, however it is continued during the evaluation process.

(ii) The decision to exclude a proposal for failing one or more eligibility criteria is taken by the UKF Secretariat. This decision may be taken at any appropriate moment before, during or after the evaluation sessions, when ineligibility has been proven. This decision is final and cannot be subject to dispute, except in a case of administrative error. Complaints shall be sent by e-mail to the UKF Secretariat at the following address: ured@ukf.hr.

 

Individual evaluation by independent experts

(i) All eligible proposals are evaluated in peer review by independent experts to examine their conformity with the evaluation criteria relevant for the call. The UKF Secretariat nominates up to three evaluators per project.

(ii) All independent experts are briefed before the evaluation by the UKF Secretariat in order to inform them on the general evaluation guidelines and the objectives of the program under consideration.

(iii) Each proposal is evaluated against the applicable criteria independently by up to three experts who fill in individual evaluation forms developed for the particular call giving marks and providing comments. The individual evaluation is performed remotely, i.e. evaluators examine proposals which are forwarded to them at their own place.

(iv) Evaluators examine the individual issues comprising each evaluation criteria and mark the issues on a five-point scale from 1 to 5. In this scheme, the scores indicate the following: 1 – poor; 2 – fair; 3 – good; 4 - very good; 5 – excellent.

(v) Evaluators are required to provide comments to accompany each of their marks in a form suitable for providing feedback to the applicants and/or to serve as an input to consensus discussion (see 6.5 ”Discussion of evaluators”).

(vi) The submission of the individual evaluation form (by post and/or electronically) signed by an independent expert closes his/her individual assessment. His/her evaluation form may not subsequently be changed.

(vii) Projects of max 10 000 EUR may be evaluated by SC.

 

Discussions of evaluators

(i) UKF Secretariat and SC may introduce an additional, pre-evaluation procedure in case of big number of applications are received to a call in order to facilitate the evaluation of proposals, so the evaluation procedure will be carried out in two rounds.
After remote individual evaluations in the first round of evaluation, the UKF Secretariat may organise an evaluation discussion, i.e. consensus discussion. (cf. Figure 2c). The consensus discussion is a meeting (or teleconference) where all evaluators examine together their individual evaluations in the presence of Steering Committee members and the representative of UKF Secretariat acting as moderator. The UKF representatives are not allowed to influence on the experts’ opinions. In some cases arriving at a consensus may be carried out without a meeting.

(ii) The experts attempt to agree on a consensus mark for each of the criteria and on an overall consensus report, which they then confirm. The evaluators have to explain their opinions to the UKF representatives who may ask questions regarding their consensus evaluation report.

(iii) The outcome of the first round of evaluation are evaluators reports and the list where project proposals are ranked, and only the proposals with final mark greater than 4,0 (on the scale 1 - 5) were recommended for the second round of evaluation. Those proposals are forwarded into the peer review evaluation procedure.