Flipping the grant application review process

ABSTRACT

The return on research investment resulting from new breakthrough scientific discoveries may be decreasing over time due to the law of diminishing returns, the relative decrease of research funding in terms of purchasing power parity, and various activities gaming the system. By altering the grant-review process, the scientific community may directly address the third problem. There is evidence that peer reviews of research proposals may lack reliability and may produce invalid or inconsistent ratings. In addition, extreme focus on grantsmanship threatens to uproot a cornerstone principle that scientific-value should be the key driver in funding decision-making. This opinion provides (1) a justification of the need to consider alternative strategies to boost the impact of public investment in innovative scientific discovery, (2) proposes a framework for flipping the traditional front-loaded peer-review approach to allocation of research funding, into a new back-loaded assessment of scholarly return on investment, and (3) provokes the scientific community to accelerate the debate on alternative funding mechanisms, as the stakes of inaction may be very high.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic
• grant review
• research funding
• peer review
• evaluation of education
• research index
• impact

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author was partially supported by NSF grants 1734853, 1636840, 1416953, 0716055 and 1023115, NIH grants P20 NR015331, P50 NS091856, P30 DK089503, U54 EB020406, P30 AG053760, and UL1TR002240, and the Elsie Andresen Fiske Research Fund. These funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.