Guide
Peer review and conflict of interest:
running a defensible review
Peer review is where your competition's credibility is won or lost. A defensible review needs three things: a clear rubric, blinded independent scoring, and a conflict-of-interest process that's documented — not just discussed.
Start with the rubric
Every scoring criterion should map to something in the application, with defined point ranges and anchoring language for what a strong, adequate, and weak response looks like. Vague rubrics produce scattered scores and painful consensus calls.
Blinded, independent scoring
- Reviewers score independently — they cannot see each other's scores or comments until scoring closes
- Assignments are explicit: each reviewer sees only the applications assigned to them
- Staff can track progress in real time and nudge reviewers who are falling behind
- Scores aggregate automatically into rankings — no spreadsheet merges at midnight
Conflict of interest: disclose, recuse, resolve
Every reviewer should complete a COI disclosure before seeing applications. When a conflict exists, the recusal needs to be structural — the reviewer simply never sees that application — not a promise that they'll look away.
Just as important: the disclosure, the recusal, and the resolution all need to be recorded. In a monitoring visit or an appeal, 'we handled it' is not evidence. A timestamped log is.
How The Grant Gateway handles it
The Grant Gateway builds all of this in: custom rubrics, blinded independent scoring, structured COI disclosure with automatic recusal, reviewer progress tracking, and an immutable audit log of every score and decision. Reviewers consistently tell commissions it's the easiest system they've used.
See the reviewer experience
We'll walk you through the reviewer portal, the COI workflow, and the scoring dashboard — with your rubric as the example.