2026: Science for ME reviewer nomination project, in conjunction with WWTF and WE&ME

[Science For ME]

Science for ME is looking for research proposal reviewers
A project in collaboration with the WWTF Vienna Science and Technology Fund

WWTF is a Vienna-based non-profit research funding organisation. It is the organisation supporting the WE&ME Foundation with the 2026 funding round that S4ME is collaborating on. WWTF has asked the forum committee to suggest people who could be suitable as reviewers for another ME/CFS research funding round. This round provides followup funding to some of the Vienna-based research teams funded in an earlier funding round.

A reviewer will have several weeks to read the research proposal allocated to them and prepare a written review. Each proposal will be reviewed by a range of reviewers with different perspectives in order to help the jury make decisions about which proposals to fund.

This work is voluntary.


Your expertise
You need to be able to assess a research proposal, apply your knowledge of ME/CFS, and write clearly in English. Perspectives and expertise that would be helpful for some of the proposals include:

• Experience as a person with ME/CFS, experience of severe or very severe ME/CFS
• Experience caring for a person with severe or very severe ME/CFS
• Expertise in qualitative research
• Expertise in clinical trial design
• Knowledge of common issues in ME/CFS research including patient selection
• Knowledge of issues relevant to government policies on provision of care for people with severe and very severe ME/CFS
• Expertise in fields of community nursing, immunology, genetics and epigenetics, skeletal muscle, vascular system, metabolomics
• Knowledge of ME/CFS literature

You certainly do not need to have all of the expertise listed. You do not need to have ME/CFS yourself, researchers are also eligible and welcome to express an interest in being a reviewer.


The review
You will have access to the researcher's full proposal. The review should fairly assess the proposal against the key evaluation criteria (https://wiki.wwtf.at/books/mecfs-call-2026-consolidation/page/funding-and-evaluation-criteria). It should be no more than three pages, including a brief summary. Good reviews can be short. You may not use generative AI to produce your review.


How to apply
If you are interested, please send an expression of interest to Trish by direct message. The expression of interest should be up to three paragraphs setting out your relevant expertise and experience. You will need to include your real name. If you have severe ME/CFS, you and a carer or friend can apply as one author team. Please note how many proposals you are willing to review.

Your expression of interest together with your posting history on the forum, will be reviewed by a sub-committee of the forum committee. The sub-committee members are Forestglip, Hutan and Trish. The subcommittee will nominate qualified reviewers for each of six proposals. If you are nominated, we will let you know and will forward your expression of interest to WWTF.

Your personal information will be kept confidential by the forum sub-committee and deleted from the forum once the process has been completed. WWTF will be aware of your real name (but not your forum name) as will the funding round jury. Reviews (without author names) will be given to the researcher teams when the funding decisions have been made.

If you are interested, but unsure whether you have enough experience or if you can write well enough in English, we encourage you to apply anyway. We will offer support to reviewers that we have nominated, including proofreading.


Timing
We need your Expression of Interest by 20 July 2026. We will let you know if you have been nominated by the end of July. Nomination is not a guarantee that you will be appointed as WWTF will also be recruiting reviewers directly.



We are very pleased that we can offer this opportunity to members. We think it is a recognition of the expertise among our members and of the value of the forum in advancing community knowledge. We think it is a great opportunity to build the stock of experienced reviewers who really understand ME/CFS. Thanks to WWTF for their ongoing commitment to patient involvement in health research and for including Science for ME in the evaluation process.

 

[EndME]

Nice! Well done to everyone getting this organised!

 

[ME/CFS Science Blog]

Positive news again, hope many people will apply.

 

[Sly Saint]

Are you somehow going to contact people who are members but not regular participants here on the forum or who haven't logged in for a while? eg @Keith Geraghty

 

[Utsikt]

Are you somehow going to contact people who are members but not regular participants here on the forum or who haven't logged in for a while? eg Keith Geraghty.

I don’t think we can expect the panel to do active outreach, but anyone are free to send this to thread to people they think might want to apply.

 

[Sly Saint]

I don’t think we can expect the panel to do active outreach, but anyone are free to send this to thread to people they think might want to apply.

do you mean the committee? We have discussed the possibility of 'mass' emailing before to inform past members of important issues.
Recently, I keep getting this banner across the bottom of the screen saying "Science for ME would like your permission to enable push notifications." which seems to do just that if you agree.

eta: I can't find what I was thinking of but there was this https://s4me.info/threads/bug-reports.386/post-409662 after S4ME sent out a mass email with a Christmas message.

 

[Utsikt]

do you mean the committee?

The sub-committee that will go through the applications. But the argument would apply to all staff. If it turns out that recruiting people is challenging it might be warranted to do more targeted outreach.

I don’t see any issues with using push notifications or other built-in systems for notifying members of this thread.

 

[Ravn]

Very happy to see this further collaboration

You will have access to the researcher's full proposal. The review should fairly assess the proposal against the key evaluation criteria (https://wiki.wwtf.at/books/mecfs-call-2026-consolidation/page/funding-and-evaluation-criteria).

From the link

Funding and evaluation criteria

The following criteria are used in the evaluation.

• Scope: Does the project fall within the scope of the call, as described in the Call Specifications, and does it demonstrate clear continuity with the previously funded project?

The key criteria in the evaluation of proposals are scientific quality, novelty, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity:

• Scientific excellence and academic potential of the applicant(s): Accomplishments and potential of the applicants to conduct the proposed research (measured by academic age).
• Innovative character of the proposed research project: Does the proposed research work meet the highest relevant international quality standards? Does the project show scientific originality and innovative aspects? Are the methods and research approaches appropriate and complementary? Does the project have the potential to explore novel research avenues and approaches?
• Consortia composition and interdisciplinary collaboration: Consortia should include an appropriate mix of expertise, bringing together researchers from complementary scientific disciplines. A clear description of the roles, responsibilities, and competencies of all core team members is mandatory.
• Partnership with non-academic stakeholders: Consortia must demonstrate how researchers, patient representatives, and relevant stakeholders will actively collaborate throughout the project. Roles need to be specified in e.g. project governance and/or how they will contribute to key research decisions and processes.

Further criteria include academic & clinical impact, feasibility of the proposed project plan, Data management and Gender aspects. Please note that career breaks such as for parental leave, care duty and prolonged illness will be taken into account in the evaluation of the proposals. In order for these to be considered, please provide the relevant time periods.

This makes it sound quite scary and like there’d be a higher level of technical expertise needed than for PPI?

I clicked around that site a bit trying to find out what a proposal might look like, but failed. Is it similar to what you might see on a website listing preregistered protocols? Or more like a full research paper, maybe with the results section replaced by some unpublished pilot data? Or even more substantial than that?

Can the S4ME subcommittee give some additional guidance for any newbies to the world of proposal reviews?

A project in collaboration with the WWTF Vienna Science and Technology Fund

That link gets me a server not found message

 

[Ravn]

The page on Call Facts from the link in the previous post says it’s an invite-only call for “Previously funded Principal Investigators (PI) or Co-PIs from the WWTF ME/CFS Call 2024 - Understanding ME/CFS Call (One Proposal per Team).”

I think they’re the ones listed here

Please correct me if I got anything wrong

Oh, and if anyone from WE&ME is reading, could you please consider stopping those running thingies that pop up whenever you point the cursor at the menu on your website? They’re kind of cute but extremely distracting and, for me at least, also motion sickness nausea inducing

 

[forestglip]

That link gets me a server not found message

Thank you, that's fixed.

 

[Hutan]

Are you somehow going to contact people who are members but not regular participants here on the forum or who haven't logged in for a while? eg @Keith Geraghty

Just on Keith specifically, he is already known to WWTF, having served on the jury of the 2024 call. The funding round that we are looking for reviewers for is the followup to the 2024 call, giving further funds to a subset of the 2024 awardees.




More generally, on recruiting reviewers for this funding round, WWTF are recruiting reviewers directly as well as working with the forum to recruit via our members and their networks. Please do let anyone you know who you think could do a good job know about this recruitment project.

 

[Hutan]

This makes it sound quite scary and like there’d be a higher level of technical expertise needed than for PPI?

I clicked around that site a bit trying to find out what a proposal might look like, but failed. Is it similar to what you might see on a website listing preregistered protocols?

In my limited experience, a proposal is like a protocol summary, but with a substantial section on the researcher's track record. I don't know what the proposals for this funding round will be like, given that it is a followup round. A consideration of how the first funding has been used and how the proposed work builds on the completed work seems important.

I think it could be useful to think about some of the peer reviews that we have looked at on the forum. If you could you write something at least as useful as the average quality peer review that we see, then you are likely to be a strong candidate for these reviewer roles. @Ravn, I am confident that you could write a a very useful review. If you are thinking of applying, I encourage you to do so.

WWTF are hoping to provide some guidance to the ME/CFS community to help us all understand what is involved in writing a good review, although it is likely to be in early August, after applications close.

Our super-power, compared to the average academic just trying to get the peer review job ticked off their to do list, is that we care a lot about the outcome. So, we are more likely to take the time needed to read the relevant literature, check the track records and set our responses in the context of research priorities.

 

[Ravn]

My thinking was more along the lines of removing potential barriers for others who might be considering but hesitating (members who have all my generalist skills plus much higher technical ones, whether self-taught or from formal education). The unknown and uncertainty are significant barriers for many. Perhaps even more so for pwME/CFS who have to take into account the very real possibility of an untimely crash preventing them from delivering on what they promised. This can’t be a surprise to WE&ME but do they have a specific policy for dealing with this? Or is it just that by having several reviewers per proposal they don’t worry about one or two dropping out? Some reassuring words from them on this might help lower this particular barrier a little

Another thing I’m wondering about more generally, not just for the present call, is the effect of different science cultures in different fields on reviewer ratings. The accepted and expected level of rigour varies quite a bit and most reviewers will reflect the standards in their particular field. So what happens when you mix reviewers with high and with low expectations? If reviewers are randomly assigned then proposals of equal value could be rated very differently, just through luck of the draw rather than quality. The only mechanism I’ve seen to deal with this seems to be having two or three reviewers per application and hoping for the best. Are there more systematic approaches?

A practical example would be PPI. Exaggerating for effect here but some reviewers might consider the PPI requirement met only if it approaches DecodeME standards. Another reviewer from a field where PPI is routinely an afterthought and a tick box exercise would consider the PPI requirement met at that much lower level. So a proposal containing middling PPI would get the thumbs up or down on that point depending on who the reviewer was

I think this is something WE&ME need to think about if they haven’t already. I rather suspect reviewers from S4ME would look for a higher level of rigour than most other reviewers. A good thing in principle but you wouldn’t want 3 S4ME reviewers assigned to one application and none to another. Better to have S4ME reviewers distributed equally across all proposals

 

[Utsikt]

Better to have S4ME reviewers distributed equally across all proposals

You can’t say patients have been involved in the reviews if they have not been involved in all in one way or another. I would be surprised if they are planning to do something else, especially with the statement from one of the brothers.

 

[Trish]

The funding body will make the final decision on who writes reviews for each research proposal. I think the idea of S4ME involvement is that they want to try to ensure some involvement of pwME or carers, but we can also include forum members who are scientists and clinicians who are active forum members in our nominations.

We only have one volunteer so far.

I think it will be understood that reviewers who are volunteering as pwME or carers may not be experienced in writing reviews, but so long as you can read a research proposal and make sensible comments about it under the headings provided from the perspective of first hand knowledge of ME/CFS and of discussing research on the forum, that would be a useful contribution. We're not being asked to make the final decision on what gets funded, just to provide some input into the jury process.

 

[Hutan]

This can’t be a surprise to WE&ME but do they have a specific policy for dealing with this? Or is it just that by having several reviewers per proposal they don’t worry about one or two dropping out?

This funding round is administered by WWTF, the Vienna Science and Technology Fund, who have administered several funding rounds now.

Yes, I think the idea is that there will be two or three reviewers per proposal, so, if one dropped out, it would be okay. And, of course, there is still the jury, who need to do their own work to evaluate the proposals, as well as being assisted by the reviews.

If reviewers are randomly assigned then proposals of equal value could be rated very differently, just through luck of the draw rather than quality.

A practical example would be PPI. Exaggerating for effect here but some reviewers might consider the PPI requirement met only if it approaches DecodeME standards. Another reviewer from a field where PPI is routinely an afterthought and a tick box exercise would consider the PPI requirement met at that much lower level. So a proposal containing middling PPI would get the thumbs up or down on that point depending on who the reviewer was

One thing I have learnt from elsewhere (not with WWTF and WE&ME) is that obtaining grants can be a bit of a lottery. The people allocated to review it, whether the proposal is considered at the end of the day when the jury are a bit tired, whether there is another good proposal that is quite similar, how well the jury happens to know the researchers.... We won't eliminate chance entirely, but hopefully the reviewers we nominate can help ensure that proposals are carefully evaluated from a number of perspectives.

 

[Sly Saint]

A good thing in principle but you wouldn’t want 3 S4ME reviewers assigned to one application and none to another.

But wouldn't it be less pressure and maybe more effective for the S4ME members to work on one review at a time, together.?

 

[Kitty]

so long as you can read a research proposal and make sensible comments about it under the headings provided

If there's a standard pro forma for reviews, might WWTF let prospective reviewers see it? It might help them get a sense of what's expected and how much they'd need to write, without revealing anything about the actual proposals.

 

[Trish]

If there's a standard pro forma for reviews, might WWTF let prospective reviewers see it? It might help them get a sense of what's expected and how much they'd need to write, without revealing anything about the actual proposals.

There's an outline of what is required posted in post #8 on this thread.

 

[Trish]

But wouldn't it be less pressure and maybe more effective for the S4ME members to work on one review at a time, together.?

That would mean they all needed to read all the proposals. I suspect most of us would find that too much, since there is quite a short time limitation of a few weeks for all the reviews to be submitted once reviewers are appointed. The overview of all the research proposals is the job of the selection panel, not the reviewers.