What is it about?
In a recent PNAS Perspectives article, an interdisciplinary team spanning fields from statistics and philosophy to meta-research, scientometrics, and social informatics, has now dealt with the effects of competitive practices in research funding allocation. The team concluded that the current system, based on grant applications and peer review, is extremely time-consuming and costly. Time and resources that could be spent on actual research are lost writing and evaluating research proposals. Competitive systems have a bias against high-risk research and thus they thwart innovation even when funders claim that they fund to fund innovative work. There is an incentive to propose predictable (if not outright mediocre) projects which are most likely to be funded, not projects which are most likely to benefit humanity.
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Why is it important?
Research funding systems fundamentally influence how science operates.
Perspectives
As scientists, we know that the scientific method works. When there is a difficult question to be answered, we have to hypothesise, experiment, collect and analyse data. There is no reason why we should not apply this proven method to science funding too.
Gerald Schweiger
TU Wien
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The costs of competition in distributing scarce research funds, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2407644121.
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