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South Africa's National Research Foundation (NRF) was officially established on 1 April. It creates a single funding agency covering all research except clinical medicine at the country's universities, technikons (polytechnics) and museums.

The new organization combines the role of the old Foundation for Research Development (FRD) with the grant-giving functions of the Human Sciences Research Council, which still exists to administer its own in-house research programmes.

Members of the NRF council were announced on 30 March by Ben Ngubane, the re-appointed Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. It will be chaired by psychologist M. F. Ramashala, vice-chancellor of the University of Durban-Westville.

Khotso Mokhele, the former president of the FRD, will act as interim chief executive officer until the council appoints a head, although he is widely regarded as the front-runner for the post.

Research support will be handled by four divisions of the NRF: natural science and engineering; humanities and social sciences; environmental and agricultural sciences; and health sciences. The health sciences division is relatively small, as the NRF only pays for fundamental research in this area; clinical research is covered by the Medical Research Council, which remains autonomous.

A fifth division consists of the national research facilities that were previously part of the FRD: the SA Astronomical Observatory, the National Accelerator Centre, the Hartebeeshoek Radio-Astronomy Observatory and the J. L. B. Smith Institute of Ichthyology.

One of the government's aims in creating the foundation is to open up new opportunities for collaboration between the natural and social sciences, as it is in favour of interdisciplinary research. But the NRF faces the difficult task of integrating two very different mechanisms for evaluating research proposals in these disciplines.

The FRD has had a complex evaluation mechanism. A major component has been the individual rating of scientists by peer review. This has required that all scientists wishing to apply for funding are personally evaluated every five years, in addition to applying annually for research grants for the following year.

In contrast, research in the social sciences has been based primarily on project evaluation. Social scientists do not seem enthusiastic about the FRD evaluation system, though Mokhele described it last month as “the envy of research communities worldwide”.

Mokhele sees the current funding mechanisms as remaining in place until the end of next year, when the FRD's current set of research programmes end.