1. Your Potential Conflicts of Interests.
ACS PRF reviewers and committee members must be aware of potential conflict of interest situations that may arise. Read the examples of potentially biasing affiliations or relationships listed in this document. As an ACS PRF reviewer or committee member, you will be asked to review research grant proposals. You might have a conflict with one or more. Should any conflict arise, you must bring the matter to the attention of the ACS PRF Program Officer who asked you to complete the review. The Program Officer will determine how the matter should be handled and tell you what further steps, if any, to take.
2. No Use of “Insider” Information.
During the proposal review process, you will likely have access to information not generally available to the public. Therefore, you must not use that information for your personal benefit or make it available for the personal benefit of any other individual or organization. This is to be distinguished from the entirely appropriate general benefit of learning more about ACS and ACS PRF, learning from other reviewers and committee members, or becoming better acquainted with the state of a given discipline.
3. Your Obligation to Maintain the Confidentiality of Proposals and Applicants.
ACS PRF receives proposals in confidence and protects the confidentiality of their contents. For this reason, you must not copy, quote, or otherwise use or disclose to anyone, including your graduate students or postdoctoral or research associates, any material from any proposal you are asked to review. In addition, reviewers are prohibited from uploading any content from proposals, review information, and related records to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.
4. Confidentiality of the Review Process and Reviewer Names.
ACS keeps reviews and your identity as a reviewer of specific proposals confidential to the maximum extent possible, except that we routinely send to principal investigators edited excerpts of reviews of their own proposals without your name, affiliation, or other identifying information. Please respect the confidentiality of all principal investigators and other reviewers. Do not disclose their identities, the relative assessments, or rankings of proposals by a peer review panel or other details about the peer review of proposals. Unauthorized disclosure of any confidential information could subject you to sanctions.
