The Happy Medium
19/11/10 16:45 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Fri, 11/19/2010 - 14:45.
Jeremy Berg's data with respect to scientific output and its linkage to grant funding is extremely interesting, and it confirms what I and many others have suspected all along, i.e. too high amounts of funding for a laboratory group can provide diminishing returns. This has enormous implications for the funding of mega projects, for example, from organizations such as Genome Canada.
From the careful analysis of the funding and scientific publications from 2938 investigators supported by the US NIGMS from 2007 to mid-2010, the Division of Information Services in the NIH Office of Extramural Research determined that the median annual total direct cost was $220,000, the median number of grant-linked publications was six and the median journal average impact factor was 5.5. As this covered a 3.5 year period, it would appear that the typical costs of a scientific paper with a 5.5 impact factor is about $128,000. However, in the estimation of these numbers, funding from non-NIH sources was not factored in, so the actual costs are even more. Frankly, this is an incredibly high cost, and it raises serious concerns about the efficiency of scientific research as it is funded and conducted today.
Link to the original blog post.
Jeremy Berg's data with respect to scientific output and its linkage to grant funding is extremely interesting, and it confirms what I and many others have suspected all along, i.e. too high amounts of funding for a laboratory group can provide diminishing returns. This has enormous implications for the funding of mega projects, for example, from organizations such as Genome Canada.
From the careful analysis of the funding and scientific publications from 2938 investigators supported by the US NIGMS from 2007 to mid-2010, the Division of Information Services in the NIH Office of Extramural Research determined that the median annual total direct cost was $220,000, the median number of grant-linked publications was six and the median journal average impact factor was 5.5. As this covered a 3.5 year period, it would appear that the typical costs of a scientific paper with a 5.5 impact factor is about $128,000. However, in the estimation of these numbers, funding from non-NIH sources was not factored in, so the actual costs are even more. Frankly, this is an incredibly high cost, and it raises serious concerns about the efficiency of scientific research as it is funded and conducted today.
Link to the original blog post.