The Real Cost of the NSERC Peer Review is Less than 5% of a Proposed Baseline Grant

Abstract

A recent publication in this journal (Gordon and Poulin, 2009) argues that the cost of the NSERC peer review exceeds the cost of giving every researcher a $30,000 baseline grant. However, the authors overestimated the ratio of peer review expenses to baseline grant cost by a factor of 26. The real cost of peer review is less than 5% of the baseline grant amount.

Keywords:

• cost effective
• discovery grants program
• NSERC
• peer review

Notes

¹The part of a DG proposal that actually describes the research plan consists of 5 pages.