[{"id":69,"title":"Reducing the peer review burden and raising grant success rates by passing a simple law","sha":"0b34a8a607005992056b4f4eb8fed76c","user_id":267,"state":"published","body":"Pass a law that limits the total dollars that a research organization can request from the federal government to three times the average dollars they received in previous years. This would immediately change the average success rate of grants to one in three; a major improvement from current rates. Scientists would be free to spend more time in the lab and less time writing and reviewing grants.\r\n\r\nHow would this work? If an institution did not generate an internal screen for limiting applications, their grants would be assigned a random number and only the appropriate fraction would be sent on to the respective funding agency. Smart institutions would establish priorities that matched to their values (e.g. supporting young scientists or multidisciplinary science). \r\n\r\nAsking institutions to screen grant applications based on their values would be a big change. But it is reasonable to ask institutions to share the burden of peer review and to play a roll in the process of selecting the best ideas. Regardless of how institutions responded, the burden of peer review would drop. Scientists would spend less time in DC, less time at the computer, and more time in the lab. ","created_at":"2015-02-19T19:05:06.450Z","updated_at":"2023-12-12T21:01:35.952Z","zenodo_id":23159,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15533","subject":null,"tags":["research","researchers","academia","publishing","economy","science","society","occupation","science_policy","workforce","government","logistics","market","universities","creativity"],"vote_count":10,"view_count":1,"score":10.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":false,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null},{"id":90,"title":"The Austrian Science Fund (FWF): Analyzing Decision Making and Peer Review","sha":"a79dd10c3b3804e4797bf1882ebf401d","user_id":151,"state":"published","body":"The legitimacy of a funding agency in basic research depends at least on the following factors: \r\n* organization’s ability to minimize distortions in approval probability by its decision procedure\r\n* the scientific quality of results produced by funded research proposals\r\n* the acceptance of the procedures by the scientific community. \r\n\r\nTo ensure these requirements, the [FWF] (http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/) started a sequence of empirical studies which contain analyses of the decision making procedure (peer review) as well as statistical and bibliometric analyses of FWF funded proposals. A survey among the Austrian scientific community followed. Some of the analyses are conducted by the FWF itself, others by independent experts, eg. from the [MPG Munich] (http://www.lutz-bornmann.de/) or [CWTS Leiden.] (http://www.socialsciences.leiden.edu/) All results are [openly accessible.] (http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/about-the-fwf/publications/)\r\n\r\nOur endeavor will round off all these studies to summarize the results. Addressees of this (policy) paper are the scientific community, policy makers and the public. FWF’s goal is to address urban legends about its work, compare results and link them to get the big picture of FWF’s efforts during the last years. Among others we will address potential biases in our decision mechanisms, discuss outcomes and impacts and compare the results with the opinions of the scientific community.\r\n\r\n\r\n*[Falk Reckling](/users/df7f367ccf932e5acf3d918adda77a79), Ralph Reimann, [Klaus Zinöcker](/users/4a556c9956cef302c8f19c97a2adcc00), FWF*\r\n\r\n\r\n","created_at":"2015-02-23T08:39:47.441Z","updated_at":"2015-02-27T08:47:42.192Z","zenodo_id":23334,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15602","subject":null,"tags":["science_policy","researchers","research","evaluation","peer-review","bibliometrics"],"vote_count":2,"view_count":1,"score":2.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":false,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null}]