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  • Notes on a broken science funding system

    Sun, 2013-04-07 13:14 -- John Hawks

    A jeremiad from Henry Bourne: "Writing on the wall" [1].

    Competition drives scientific discovery, but too much competition for scarce resources can block progress, and has done so. Thus, the growing flood of grant applications surpasses growth in NIH dollars, reduces the proportion of grants that are funded, and renders peer review increasingly arbitrary because a project ranked in the 20th percentile is often no less meritorious than one ranked in the 10th percentile (Berg, 2013).

    Another problem is that we now have a ‘holding tank' of postdoctoral scholars that is overflowing with bright young scientists who are indentured to greying lab chiefs and are thus unable to break new ground as independent researchers (Bourne, 2012). The worst consequence, but harder to quantify, is that scientists avoid risky, creative projects in favour of ‘sure things’ more likely to be funded by conservative reviewers (Nicholson and Ioannidis, 2012).

    Probably most people who have thought about these problems recognize the fundamental catch-22 represented by centralized funding of science. It would be more efficient of time, training, and human capital of all kinds to simply pick a limited number of "winners" early in their careers, provide adequate funding to a relatively small number of institutes, and turn excess talent away at the door. But large institutes often breed groupthink and complacency. There is no accurate indicator of "talent" that would allow selection of those who will achieve great scientific findings from the vast pool of undergraduates. And forcing people to compete every so often does provide a mechanism for cutting out deadwood. That is to say, the likeliest alternative to the current system has lots of obvious problems.

    Yet as Bourne and many others say, granting agencies have become the main drivers of groupthink and complacency, we have set up a system where talented creative people are actively turned away from science careers, and no "deadwood" is ever actually cut out of the system because networks of greyhairs protect each other zealously.

    I want to draw attention to the comment section of the essay, which has a series of thoughtful exchanges. This passage from Bourne deserves to be front-paged:

    A more vexing and crucial problem is that even the faculty who agree with me remain silent and virtually inert. They worry constantly about difficulties getting grants funded, and (correctly) feel pressured to spend most of their time writing grant applications, scrambling to support students and postdocs, and wrangling with prestigious journals. These pressures combine with habituation (in earlier years) to a friendlier funding climate to impose a devastating inertia.

    My instinct is that we need to democratize the process of science. A wider group of researchers should have power, not just a stake in the results.

    References

    1. Bourne HR. The writing on the wall. eLife. 2013;2:e00642 - e00642.
    Tags: 
    metascience
    grants
    funding
    careers

  • Centuries of grant writing

    Tue, 2013-04-02 15:40 -- John Hawks

    Jenny Rohn has an article on the wasted effort into failed grant writing, which is so full of good paragraphs it's hard to figure out which one to snip: "Show me the money: Grantwriting is taking over science". Here's one:

    There is some evidence that having the vast majority of scientists spend the vast majority of their time writing grants instead of doing and thinking science might be a tad inefficient, and not, perhaps, the best way to get science done. A recent correspondence in Nature about the Australian system, for example, reported that collectively, in 2012, researchers spent "more than five centuries' worth of time" writing or revising grants for the major funding scheme; as only 20.5% were successful, this account for a staggering four centuries' worth of wasted time.

    I suppose if we looked at the U.S. we'd be talking about the geological timescale.

    Tags: 
    grants
    metascience

  • The cost of plagiarism at NSF

    Fri, 2013-03-08 20:04 -- John Hawks

    I pass this along from ScienceInsider, really too irritated for clever comment: "NSF Audit of Successful Proposals Finds Numerous Cases of Alleged Plagiarism".

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) is investigating nearly 100 cases of suspected plagiarism drawn from a single year's worth of proposals funded by the agency.

    The cases grow out of an internal examination by NSF's Office of Inspector General (IG) of every proposal that NSF funded in fiscal year 2011. James Kroll, head of administrative investigations within the IG's office, tells ScienceInsider that applying plagiarism software to NSF's entire portfolio of some 8000 awards made that year resulted in a "hit rate" of 1% to 1.5%. "My group is now swamped," he says about his staff of six investigators.

    So...

    Between 1 and 1.5% of the NSF budget is going to fund obvious plagiarists. Obvious because they can be caught with standard plagiarism filters, which are not richly seeded with scientific papers.

    Because closed access stands in the way of incorporating much of the scientific literature into such databases.

    And this doesn't count the incidence of grants that are given to applications proposing work that is already done.

    The NSF budget is not evenly distributed among grants, and I suppose that many small grants probably contain more plagiarism than the few really big ones. Still, we're talking about $50 million or so.

    UPDATE (2013-03-09): A reader writes:

    I was just reading your post on plagiarism, and it made me recall something that happened to me years ago when I was a practicing biochemist. My boss received a grant to review on some work proposed by one of our competitors. He passed off a copy to me to look at (I was a postdoc at the time.) On reading the background section, there was a paragraph that sounded familiar. I did a little looking around on my computer and it turned out the reason the paragraph sounded familiar was that I had written it. But not in a paper - it was in one of our grant proposals. The material didn't concern any proposed experiments - it was just part of a short review of the state of the field, so we never did anything about it. I knew the guy who did this and he was quite capable of writing a decent paragraph himself, so I never could figure out why he borrowed my material. Anyway, it may not be enough to get all the literature in the database - they should have all the other grant proposals in there too.

    This is another essential area. Probably the most common outcome is people stealing ideas from other proposals. The texts of unfunded proposals are not available to the public, which may cut down on stealing but also impedes comparing funded proposals. I tend to think that the lower the success rate, the more likely we'll see substantial cheating of one kind or another.

    Tags: 
    grants
    metascience
    funding
    ethics

  • Interdisciplinary research funding opportunity from NSF

    Wed, 2013-01-30 00:25 -- John Hawks

    I've received a notice from Carolyn Ehardt of a new funding opportunity from NSF that may be of great interest to some readers. This is a really exciting chance to take on some interdisciplinary work.

    From the website:

    Summary of the INSPIRE funding opportunity: The INSPIRE awards program was established to address some of the most complicated and pressing scientific problems that lie at the intersection of traditional disciplines. It is intended to encourage investigators to submit bold, exceptional proposals that some may consider to be at a disadvantage in a standard NSF review process; it is not intended for proposals that are more appropriate for existing award mechanisms. INSPIRE is open to interdisciplinary proposals on any NSF-supported topic, submitted by invitation only after a preliminary inquiry process initiated by submission of a required Letter of Intent (LOI). In fiscal year 2013, INSPIRE provides support through the following three pilot grant mechanisms:

    INSPIRE Track 1. This is essentially a continuation of the pilot CREATIV mechanism from FY 2012, which was detailed for 2012 in Dear Colleague Letter NSF 12-011.

    INSPIRE Track 2. These are "mid-scale" research awards at a larger scale than Track 1, allowing for requests of up to $3,000,000 over a duration of up to five years. Expectations for cross-cutting advances and for broader impacts are greater than in Track 1, and the review process includes external review.

    Director's INSPIRE Awards. These are prestigious individual awards to single-investigator proposals that present ideas for interdisciplinary advances with unusually strong, exciting transformative potential.

    All NSF directorates and programmatic offices participated in INSPIRE in FY 2012 and are continuing their participation in FY 2013.

    LETTER OF INTENT (LOI) DUE DATES:

    INSPIRE Track 2 Inquiries: Letter of Intent Due Date February 20, 2013

    INSPIRE Track 1 Inquiries (also for Director’s INSPIRE Awards): Letter of Intent Due Date March 29, 2013

    Full proposal submission is by invitation only, based on evaluation by NSF staff of the required Letter of Intent.

    There are excellent possibilities in biological anthropology and human evolution for such work.

    Tags: 
    grants
    NSF

  • Moonies of Bethesda

    Fri, 2012-11-30 16:22 -- John Hawks

    Highly recommended for Friday: Michael Eisen on "Is the NIH a cult?"

    The NIH has several national indoctrination programs, but the most dangerous and effective is something known as the “Training Grant”. These NIH cells, found on most university campuses across the country and always led by an established “grantee”, prey on impressionable youths just out of college and eager to shed the structure of their parents’ worlds. The NIH takes them under its wing and gives them a generous personal stipend and a structured program of research and experimentation. They dangle the carrot of one day becoming a “grantee”, but they do not tell them about the lonely, grueling years to come, or that only a handful of them will actually make it to the point where they are even allowed to submit their first application for membership. By the time they are done with this program, most have drunk the NIH Kool Aid, and can think of nothing they want more than to become a grantee. And those who do not feel they have sunk too much of their time and energy into these first steps along the grantee path to give up.

    The "charismatic leader" section is not to be missed.

    Tags: 
    humor
    grants
    NIH

  • NSF changes Biological Anthropology program deadlines

    Mon, 2012-08-27 22:28 -- John Hawks

    Many of my readers who are biological anthropologists at the faculty or graduate level were surprised earlier this month at the announcement that the National Science Foundation is moving deadlines and grant cycles, effective immediately.

    The details are given in the NSF "Dear Colleagues" letter. The key changes are (1) a change in the cycle from twice-yearly to 8-months for both regular (senior) awards and for dissertation improvement (DDRIG) grants, and (2) an immediate change in deadlines:

    Effective beginning August 2012, the Biological Anthropology Program (Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences) will convert to an 8-month interval between competitions for both the regular research (Senior) awards and the doctoral dissertation research improvement grants (DDRIG). There will be no alterations to the scope of the programs or to the merit review procedures for each, the requirements for proposals submitted to each remain unchanged, and investigators should anticipate receipt of decisions on proposals within the same timeframe (most typically, within 6 months of the submission deadline/target date). There will be an impact on the deadline/target dates for the two competitions and the purpose of this letter is to convey those changes.

    The target date for submission of regular research (Senior) proposals for the next funding cycle will be altered in the process of establishing the new format. The original target date for the 2012 fall funding cycle of 20 August 2012 has been changed to 7 December 2012. Subsequent target dates will fall on the first Friday of the month following the 8-month interval: 2 August 2013; 4 April 2014; 5 December 2014.

    The deadline for submission of dissertation research proposals for the 2012 fall funding cycle remains unchanged: 16 August 2012. The subsequent submission deadlines will reflect the newly instituted 8-month interval and will be the first Friday of the appropriate month: 5 April 2013; 6 December 2013; 1 August 2014. These remain firm deadlines.

    Researchers looking for full information should refer first to the letter.

    Upon hearing about these changes, I wrote to Carolyn Ehardt, who is the NSF program director for Biological Anthropology. She kindly agreed to a short Q-and-A about the changes. Some questions immediately came to my mind as things that future applicants would want to know about.

    Hawks: Are there other NSF programs that already have experience with an 8-month cycle?

    Ehardt: I do not have that degree of knowledge across all of the programs in the Foundation, but I can say that there is mounting concern at NSF regarding the increased 'workload' (proposal submission rates; very true of Bio Anth) coupled with declining budgets. As such, programs at NSF are reviewing their operating procedures and funding cycle - in relation to these factors. Some have gone to pre-proposals (BIO); others, like GSS, will now have one competition per year with a small proportion of those PIs not funded asked to resubmit a revised proposal within a couple of months for a second 'mini' competition in that FY (what they term the "one-plus" system). Others are decreasing panel sizes - and increasing the number of proposals that each panelist is required to review. Some are moving to virtual panels. Of the various options open, increasing the funding cycle by two months and then staggering the deadline/target dates so that the Program isn't running two simultaneous competitions (dissertation and Senior) twice per fiscal year seemed the least disruptive and most efficient, while maintaining (or even increasing) the quality of the merit review process. But, as I say, everyone is pushing to find mechanisms to confront the increasing proposal load (impacting not just the workload here, but that of the community of reviewers/panelists, as well) and declining budgets for aspects such as travel (mandated across the federal government – and which, of course, is almost exclusively concentrated in the costs of convening panels at NSF). A number of quite different models are being discussed and instituted across the Foundation.

    Hawks: On the surface, going from a twice-annually to 8-month funding cycle looks like it will decrease the number of awards per year. Will the number of funded proposals remain approximately the same, or will there be a decrease?

    Ehardt:The number of awards in a fiscal year is driven most strongly by the Program's budget – in conjunction with the budgetary requirements for conducting the research projects.

    If you carry-out the now staggered, 8-month cycle competitions on a 'planning calendar,' you will see that in one fiscal year (Oct. 1 – Sept. 30), there will be two doctoral dissertation competitions/set of awards in that fiscal year, and one Senior Research Awards competition/set of awards. In the next fiscal year, this will reverse; there will be two Senior competitions, one dissertation competition. The Program's budget allocations for dissertation and Senior awards in a given fiscal year will not change; as such, e.g., in a fiscal year with only one Senior competition, there should be a greater percentage of the highest-ranked submissions that receive funding. If there are two competitions in a fiscal year, then the allocation of awards will be spread over those two competitions, appropriate to the merit review process outcome for all proposals in each competition, as has always been the case.

    Hawks: Is the overall funding level for Biological Anthropology affected by this change?

    The fiscal year budget for the Program is not impacted by the change. The budget is dependent on federal allocations to the Foundation (even whether NSF has a budget, at all…)

    Hawks: Will success rates change under an 8-month funding cycle as opposed to the 6-month cycle?

    Ehardt: This is addressed above.

    Hawks: How do you anticipate that the 8-month funding cycle will affect resubmissions of grants for the next funding round?

    Ehardt: I await the data required to address this question…

    Hawks: With dissertation proposals in particular, it seems like students might be negatively impacted by a longer funding cycle. Is there anything we can do to get students adapted to the new changes?

    Ehardt: In very general terms, I would like to see our colleagues become more strongly and directly engaged with their doctoral students in the preparations for, and production of, their NSF DDRIG proposals. Planning in relation to degree requirements of different universities should be more proactive and anticipatory, and it would be excellent if there was a concomitant trend toward increased quality of DDRIG proposals, especially in the initial submission. With an 8-month cycle, there should be strong encouragement for enhanced faculty-student collaboration in producing highly competitive proposals submitted in a timely manner.

    Hawks: Again, many thanks for your willingness to answer questions, and feel free to add any information that you think people need to know (or any questions you've been repeatedly asked!)

    As with any changes at NSF that have impact on a program's community, these will be monitored and assessments made as to those impacts. NSF program officers are making these decisions after considerable thought and discussion, including relative assessments of the various options as they fit with their community's research needs. And should there be strong evidence of broad-scale, significant negative impact, alterations or movement to other possible models can and will occur.

    I hope that these comments address the major concerns…

    Me again:

    I really appreciate Carolyn's willingness to give such detailed answers, especially because this must be an extremely busy time.

    I do know a number of researchers who were gearing up for the August 20 deadline, and who were surprised earlier this month by the change. In a couple of cases, the would-be applicants were dismayed because they are on the tenure track, and this appears to reduce their chances for funding. In others, the aspiring applicants were relieved to have the extra time.

    I'll be submitting an application for the December 7 deadline. I hope that the change to a longer funding cycle will succeed in its aims of reducing the review burden.

    Tags: 
    grants
    Synopsis: 
    A Q and A with NSF Biological Anthropology program director, Carolyn Ehardt

  • The grantest generation

    Sat, 2012-08-25 12:21 -- John Hawks

    A sobering chart:

    Ages of NIH grantees versus medical faculty ages 1980 and 2010

    The red lines are the distribution of ages of medical school faculties, in 1980 and 2010; the bars are the distribution of NIH grant recipient ages. Both increased markedly in the 30-year period, with a larger and larger gap between them. I pulled this chart from a YouTube animation that shows the figures in many intervening years. It's a slow march toward older and older grant awards, when the proportion of 55-year-old grantees has doubled, while the proportion of 39-year-old grantees has halved.

    Plus a totally new category: the septuagenerian grantee.

    I wonder how many of the 65-year-old grantees of 2010 were part of the large crop of 35-year-old grantees in 1980. A fortunate generation of research scientists.

    UPDATE (2012-08-26): A reader writes with the story of a scientist who kept the same R01 grant for 28 years, renewing competitively in every cycle, but without any other funding worries until he decided to retire. If you watch the linked video, you'll see a "bump" of grants that ages upward for more than fifteen years. If grants were not renewable, of course, this bump would have smoothed itself out over the course of a grant cycle or two. Instead, we see how a single NIH budget bump was carried forward by a lucky group of researchers across nearly their entire careers!

    UPDATE (2012-08-27): Also see Neuroanthropology on the same topic.

    Tags: 
    grants
    metascience

  • "We don't need a master"

    Sun, 2012-05-27 13:56 -- John Hawks

    The Boston Globe has a a story about a new institute, founded by Jon F. Wilkins, that aims to solve some of the administrative problems facing independent scholars: "The Ronin Institute for wayward academics".

    But the issue isn’t just a lack of jobs for would-be academics. To do research, young scholars usually need to find full-time academic jobs. By training more people than it can employ, the current system leaves untapped brainpower languishing.

    In a white paper published this month by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Wilkins and coauthor Samuel Arbesman, a senior scholar at the foundation, are suggesting an alternative. Academics, they argue, need not be professors with experiences “steeped within the ivory tower.” They can be “fractional scholars”—a term they coined—pursuing their interests on their own, outside of academia. “Many, many PhDs have the ability to do it,” said Arbesman, who has also written for Ideas. There’s just one issue. “Within the current culture,” he said, “you need some sort of institutional affiliation.”

    As the article explains, the affiliation is necessary for grant-seeking from some funding sources. Obviously its other function -- as a source of credibility -- depends on the scholars who affiliate with the Institute and their work. I think such an institute needs to establish a positive agenda so that others won't perceive it as a mere reaction to the job market.

    One way that other institutes gain credibility is by becoming involved with training students, or facilitating students to do work with established scholars. (The Santa Fe Institute, which the article mentions, is one that provides opportunities for advanced students to interact with resident scholars, for example). Could there be "Ronin workshops"?

    Tags: 
    metascience
    academics
    politics
    grants

  • Small grants enhance exploration

    Mon, 2012-04-16 11:50 -- John Hawks

    Blogger "Prof-like substance" opens the curtain a bit on grant reviews: "What I learned at an NSF Bio preproposal panel".

    - Small proposals get killed. For a long time there has always been the party line at NSF that there was no reason for a small grant mechanism because you could always send in a small proposal. Well, guess what happens when you remove the budget and measure all proposals with the same stick? Yeah.

    This is really a problem, since the usual outcome is that sections fund a set of large projects with budgets that must be trimmed to the point of near-inviability.

    Small grants are incredibly important to scientific exploration. We should be funding more of them, particularly with the limited funds NSF has at its disposal. We need more people in more places doing more things independently.

    Besides which, a small grant from a section enables the PI to pursue additional supplements to get undergraduates involved in research, to broaden outreach opportunities. It also establishes credibility for projects in ways that attract other funding sources. Getting into the grant system is the most effective way for a young PI to find collaborations that will succeed in competitions for much larger interdisciplinary projects (like the "Big Data" initiative currently underway).

    I think making more small grants available to more researchers would be the single best thing NSF could do to improve its overall proposal pool.

    Tags: 
    grants
    metascience

  • Max-Planck-Weizmann

    Tue, 2012-01-10 08:50 -- John Hawks

    A reader tipped me off to this Michael Balter news item: "New German-Israeli Center Will Research Archaeology and Anthropology".

    The new Max Planck Weizmann Center for Integrative Archaeology and Anthropology, as it will be called, won't have a new building. Instead, the money will fund up to 10 postdocs or graduate students in each city, says anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. It will also support equipment and infrastructure such as the rental of additional lab space in Leipzig and the kitting out of existing space at the Weizmann Institute. Hublin and archaeologist Steve Weiner of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science at the Weizmann will co-direct the new center.

    Looks like an ambitious cooperation between two strong institutes.

    Tags: 
    grants
    institutes

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