Remarks on study proposals

From Stellar Deliverable 1.2

An internal reviewer provided us with the following remarks on the small-scale studies. The remarks address not individual projects, but rather address the rather limited way in which these first-year studies are conducted.

• Strongly rely on literature survey, which is the past rather than the future
  • Should focus on gaps and how to reduce them
• Various outputs (journal papers, working papers, workshops)
  • Should be unified for visibility (white papers and rendezvous workshops?)
• Only 6 studies with a few partners
  • Should build on and reify ongoing research works carried out in the all network and in other ongoing TEL projects - WP1 funding is to enable the sharing of preliminary results with the TEL community to enable clustering for joint interdisciplinary research
• There is a need to better define what we expect from WP1 and to explain it to the STELLAR partners during the GA in Nice
• There is a need in the studies and in WP1 to better establish the process of nurturing and updating the Grand Challenges
• There is a need in the studies and in WP1 to better demonstrate how the Grand Challenges are tackled by the TEL (STELLAR) community
• The collaborative construction of D1.1 was instrumental in that sense (and its focus on research questions is more future-oriented)

In my interpretation, the main criticism is that the studies do not sufficiently connect ongoing work and projects, but are rather self-contained. This is a valid point, which we should take into account in the second year.

Another point of concern is that the projects mainly look into the past and deal with literature review. I don't share this concern, as the studies are actually quite oriented toward practice and field studies. Still, this empirical character needs to be emphasized in the results.

Further, the studies need to be published together, to enhance visibility. We are too late for the rendezvous workshop, but we could target another Stellar event. White papers and news items published on the Stellar Website are another possiblity. During the GA in Nice we need to brainstorm about this.

As a last remark, it is not clear how the Grand Challenges are tackled by the Stellar community. My answer would be that the journal survey provides a global overview and that the small-scale study results provide focused deeper insights in specific subfields. An important step in creating the D1.2 will be a discussion on how the results actually relate and what their implications would be.