Related papers: Innovative Science
US funding agencies alone distribute a yearly total of roughly $65B dollars largely through the process of proposal peer review: scientists compete for project funding by submitting grant proposals which are evaluated by selected panels of…
Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens of billions of dollars in annual science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible to best…
Competitive allocation of research funding is a major mechanism within the science system. It is fundamentally based on the idea of peer review. Peer review is central in project selection as peers are considered to be in a unique position…
In this article we wish to provide a common set of best practice approaches that should be considered for all effective research grant proposal reviews. The federal government performs a critical role in American competitiveness and…
Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that the funder seeks, but instead are used by…
It is not easy to rationalize how peer review, as the current grassroots of science, can work based on voluntary contributions of reviewers. There is no rationale to write impartial and thorough evaluations. Consequently, there is no risk…
The number of scientific publications is constantly rising, increasing the strain on the review process. The number of submissions is actually higher, as each manuscript is often reviewed several times before publication. To face the deluge…
Scientific publishing is in a transition between the old paper-bound, static forms and the new electronic media with its interactive, dynamic possibilities. This takes place in the context of imploding library budgets and exploding magazine…
Over the last few decades, the nature of scientific research has changed in response to external influences. Firstly, powerful networked computers have become a standard tool. Secondly, society presses ever harder for research to deliver…
Scholarly journals rely on peer review to identify the science most worthy of publication. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even threatening the…
The selection process of proposals is a crucial component of scientific progress and innovations. Limited resources must be allocated in the most effective way to maximise advancements and the production of new knowledge, especially as it…
Over the last decade proposal success rates in the fundamental sciences have dropped significantly. Astronomy and related fields funded by NASA and NSF are no exception. Data across agencies show that this is not principally the result of a…
Communicating new scientific discoveries is key to human progress. Yet, this endeavor is hindered by monetary restrictions for publishing one's findings and accessing other scientists' reports. This process is further exacerbated by a large…
We develop a simple model of the scientific peer review process, in which authors of varying ability invest to produce papers of varying quality, and journals evaluate papers based on a noisy signal, choosing to accept or reject each paper.…
Peer review is a laborious, yet essential, part of academic publishing with crucial impact on the scientific endeavor. The current lack of incentives and transparency harms the credibility of this process. Researchers are neither rewarded…
In a commentary published in mid-2024 (to which the present work is a direct response), a number of scientists argue that U.S. funding agencies have "politicized" the process by which grants are awarded, in service of diversifying the…
The National Science Foundation (NSF) will be experimenting with a new distributed approach to reviewing proposals, whereby a group of principal investigators (PIs) or proposers in a subfield act as reviewers for the proposals submitted by…
Research funding systems are not isolated systems - they are embedded in a larger scientific system with an enormous influence on the system. This paper aims to analyze the allocation of competitive research funding from different…
Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation? Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades, enabling us to…
Peer review is a key activity intended to preserve the quality and integrity of scientific publications. However, in practice it is far from perfect. We aim at understanding how reviewers, including those who have won awards for reviewing,…