Related papers: Rethinking Resource Allocation in Science
One of the virtues of peer review is that it provides a self-regulating selection mechanism for scientific work, papers and projects. Peer review as a selection mechanism is hard to evaluate in terms of its efficiency. Serious efforts to…
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…
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…
Knowledge of how science is consumed in public domains is essential for a deeper understanding of the role of science in human society. While science is heavily supported by public funding, common depictions suggest that scientific research…
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 volume of scientific manuscripts is growing faster than the capacity to evaluate them, yet the institutions that govern peer review have remained largely unchanged. The result is a widening mismatch: reviewer scarcity, noisier…
The rate at which scholarly literature is being produced has been increasing at approximately 3.5 percent per year for decades. This means that during a typical 40 year career the amount of new literature produced each year increases by a…
When it comes to conversations about funding, the questions of whether the United States should be spending its resources on space-based research often rears its head. Opponents of the idea tend to share the opinion that the resources would…
Interdisciplinary collaborations now sweep most fields of the natural and life sciences, necessary to tackle the world's most challenging problems. Yet, the scientific enterprise continues to be dominated by old stereotypes:…
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…
This study examines a fundamental yet overlooked function of peer review: its role in exposing reviewers to new and unexpected ideas. Leveraging a natural experiment involving over half a million peer review invitations covering both…
Peer review is the most common mechanism in place for assessing requests for resources in a large variety of scientific disciplines. One of the strongest criticisms to this paradigm is the limited reproducibility of the process, especially…
Scientific prizes are among the greatest recognition a scientist receives from their peers and arguably shape the direction of a field by conferring credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, providing financial rewards, and promoting…
We review some key issues pertaining to NASA's Research and Analysis programs, and offer recommended actions to mitigate or resolve these issues. In particular, we recommended that NASA increases funding to support a healthy selection rate…
In an information-rich world, people's time and attention must be divided among rapidly changing information sources and the diverse tasks demanded of them. How people decide which of the many sources, such as scientific articles or…
Since a number of journals specifically focus on the review and publication of data sets, reviewing their policies seems an appropriate place to start in assessing what existing practice looks like in the 'real world' of reviewing and…
Stakeholders in the science system need to decide where to place their bets. Example questions include: Which areas of research should get more funding? Who should we hire? Which projects should we abandon and which new projects should we…
Inspired by a recent editorial (Langer 2012), we suggest a relative simple scheme to grade grants and proposals that might enhance scientific innovation.
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…
Are the sciences not advancing at an ever increasing speed? We contrast this popular perspective with the view that science funding may actually see diminishing returns, at least regarding established fields. In order to stimulate a larger…