Reporting progress and impact from your grant

Progress reports

We collect information on the progress and outputs of our funded awards.

This is primarily done using progress reports requested through our online grants management and reporting system, Flexigrant. The information we collect helps us to monitor the research that we support and evaluate the impact of our various funding schemes.

If you are a Principal Investigator on any of our funded awards, we will be asking you to complete progress reports:

• Annually (if the duration of the award is longer than 12 months);
• At the end of the award; and
• Up to five years after the end of the award.

We will send out requests and reminders for you to complete these progress reports as required through Flexigrant, at which point we will also be specifying your reporting deadlines. The Final Scientific Report due at the end of your award can be submitted within three months of our initial request; all other reports are to be submitted within one month (subject to any extension requests, which will be considered on a case-by-case basis).

If you have recently had a no-cost extension request to your award approved by our Research Funding team, we will revise any outstanding reporting deadlines on your award to reflect your new award end date.

The Principal Investigator must ensure that all information submitted in these progress reports are complete and accurate. They must also ensure that reports are submitted within the specified timeframe to avoid any delays in payments. In particular, we require the Final Scientific Report to be submitted and approved, before we can process payment of the final invoice associated with a particular award.

If you are having trouble accessing your reports on Flexigrant, please contact research@medicalresearchfoundation.org.uk.

Career Tracker

Understanding the long-term impact of our funding is a key part of our mission to support researchers and more life-changing research. We are therefore conducting a project to follow the journeys of researchers we have funded over time.

The Career Tracker survey is the first step in this initiative to help us learn how our awards have shaped careers, advanced research and contributed to wider society.

Through this survey, we aim to:

• Understand how our funding has influenced researchers’ career paths and scientific achievements
• Explore the broader contributions our awardees make, such as influencing science policy, driving innovation, and engaging the public
• Use these insights to improve the support we offer to current and future researchers
• Identify trends and challenges in medical research careers, including those faced by underrepresented groups
• Inform our work on research careers, research culture, and diversity and inclusion.

We will be contacting Principal Investigators who have completed a Fellowship, PhD studentship or research grant with the Foundation to fill out the Career Tracker survey. The survey will be sent every five years, with the first launch taking place in 2026.

If you have been asked to take part in the survey, you will be provided with further information on the invitation email. The Foundation would be very grateful for your participation, as it is important that we gather as many responses from alumni as possible.

We also aim to communicate our findings from this project with alumni who participate in the survey. In our project report, we will only provide aggregated results and will not reveal any personal information you give us. Your responses will be kept confidential to the project team and the Medical Research Foundation, subject to the consents that you provide in the survey. Further information about the use and protection of your data is available to view in our Data Privacy Notice developed for the Career Tracker project.

If you have any questions about the Career Tracker survey, or about how we monitor and evaluate the impact of our funded research, please contact research@medicalresearchfoundation.org.uk.

Open Access Policy

As part of our vision to advance medical research, improve human health and change people’s lives, we are committed to ensuring that the knowledge and discoveries which result from research we fund are available to everyone.

Open access is an important means of achieving this, as it makes published research freely and permanently available online for anyone to read, share and reuse.

All research articles that arise from our funding must be archived, as well as being immediately and freely available through Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC). If you are a Principal Investigator on any of our funded awards, please follow this link to the Europe PMC Grant Finder page to check that your publications are correctly linked to your grant. Please scroll down and select "Medical Research Foundation" in the funder section of the search builder and enter your grant reference (e.g. "MRF-123-1234-TEST") in the "Grant ID" section. If you think the list of publications generated is incomplete or incorrect, please submit and/or update your records here. Detailed instructions and guidance can be found on the Europe PMC user guide.

It is important to keep this list updated and ensure that your publications are always correctly linked to your grant. This helps us, as funders, to monitor the outputs generated by our various funding schemes.

Read our full Open Access Policy to find out more.

Tell us about your research and publications

Our Communications team is always on the lookout for inspiring research stories to highlight through our channels.

Sharing your research findings can help us to both raise your profile within the science community, and to spread the word about our mission – ultimately, helping us to reach new supporters and donors.

If you have any upcoming publications, presentations, or media appearances, we'd love to hear from you. By collaborating with us on meaningful communications content, we can help bring your life-changing medical research directly to our engaged and attentive audiences.

Please contact the team at press.team@medicalresearchfoundation.org.uk if you have anything to share, or if you'd like to discuss how we can support your work.

As always, please feel free to get in touch with the Communications team at press.team@medicalresearchfoundation.org.uk if you have any questions about using our brand in any upcoming presentations or printed/digital material.