Who will make funding decisions and on the basis of what criteria? How does the Pentagon plan to evaluate applications for funding?
The Department of Defense is piloting complementary approaches for engaging the social science community. We believe that this strategy will enable the Department to solicit a broad range of proposals from the social science community and to leverage the expertise and infrastructures of a wide array of existing mechanisms for funding basic research. One of those mechanisms is the Department of Defense Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). The Broad Agency Announcement is a well-established process that has been used to build strong relationships between the Department and the basic research community through programs such as the University Research Initiative (URI). The University Research Initiative has a long-standing, well-established reputation with the academic community for making funding decisions based on objective merit evaluation of proposals against the published criteria. The criteria for Minerva, as given in the initial Broad Agency Announcement, will form the basis for source
