ScienceGeist

Swiss funding agency banned applicant-nominated referees after a 2016 study found evidence of bias. Those results are now being made public.

The National Institutes of Health uses small groups of scientists to judge the quality of the grant proposals that they receive, and these quality judgments form the basis of its funding decisions.  In order for this system to fund the best science, the subject experts must, at a minimum, agree as to what counts as a “quality”proposal.  We investigated the degree of agreement by leveraging data from a recent experiment with 412 scientists.

The extraordinary standoff between the CDC and a drug company over patent rights raises a big question for the Trump administration: How aggressively should the government attempt to enforce its patents against an industry partner?

Academic-conference season is upon us, says Jennifer Tsang. Should I advance my career? Or pay my rent?

This week, SPARC Europe, in consultation with ALLEA, The European Foundation Centre (EFC) and Science Europe, sent surveys to almost 200 funding bodies throughout Europe. 

Women starting up research groups face more obstacles than their male peers, a UK survey finds.

The next European science and research funding programme, known as Horizon Europe, is designed to connect people with the achievements financed by their tax money, and to fix problems with innovation funding, according to Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation.

As President Trump requests deep budget cuts on science spending, he is likely to meet strong opposition in Congress.

Contrary to first impressions, Congress has done a decent job standing up for scientific research.

New study of NIH funding says women overall get smaller grants than men, even when controlling for research potential. The findings have implications for their long-term success in academic science.

Using a structured systematic comparative approach, this study analyses differences in basic research grant funding between the main academic research funding agency of Germany and the main agencies of five other countries, including the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

The UK has benefitted from funder incentives that make Open Access appealing for authors, while US funders have taken a less interventionist approach to Open Access. This in turn has led to increased international collaboration for UK researchers.

The Wellcome Trust installs an Early Career Researchers Advisory Board.

If the documents are correct, they would raise doubts about the preliminary findings of a government investigation that He Jianqui acted mostly on his own.

This article in The Lancet suggests that a traditional, project-based grant review process outperforms the increasingly popular people-not-project funding schemes.

Swiss universities fear losing out on the European Union's "Horizon Europe" science research funding pot.

We first announced plans to investigate identifiers for grants in 2017 and are almost ready to violate the first rule of grant identifiers which is “they probably should not be called grant identifiers”.

Female scientists are less likely to win research dollars from the federal government's grant agency (CIHR), when the grant application is reviewed based on the scientist leading the project, rather than the proposal.

The community-curated website aims to connect early-career researchers with funding opportunities, useful resources and each other.

Open Data Day is the yearly event where we gather to reach out to new people and build new solutions to issues in our communities using open data. To make sure some of those events have everything they needed to be great for their communities, mini-grants for the people organizing Open Data Day events will be provided.

Alyson Fox, the Director of Grants at Wellcome, explains why they're changing their policy on transferring grants to ensure research can thrive in the UK, EU and beyond.

If South Africa truly wants to encourage good research, it must stop paying academics by the paper.

When Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare disease, she and her husband, Eric Minikel, set out to find a cure.

This study presents a review of international evidence on best practice in organisational design of research and innovation funding bodies.

A much-needed debunk of shortsighted comments about science investments.

Scientists waste substantial time writing grant proposals, potentially squandering much of the scientific value of funding programs. This Meta-Research Article shows that, unfortunately, grant-proposal competitions are inevitably inefficient when the number of awards is small, but efficiency can be restored by awarding funds through a modified lottery, or by weighting past research success more heavily in funding decisions.

Many land-grant schools have submitted bids despite objections by researchers

Funders and publishers have a lot to gain from sharing and aligning peer reviews.

The humanities subjects do not benefit from the research excellence framework. They need a better system.

Launch of the ORCID funder open letter: Nine funding bodies are committed to expanding the use of ORCID in their grant applications.