Global Scientific Principles
16/05/12 13:05 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 18:10.
At first blush, the creation of the Global Research Council might seems like a good idea to harmonize the support and practices of scientific research around the world. However, I am not so sure that further politicization and standardization of scientific research is so desirable. While a strong case can be made for international funding of a few large scale projects for the common good, most research in academia and industry should be investigator-driven and collaborations should be dynamic and naturally arise from the science rather than the desires of politicians and bureaucrats to see further interactions with their favoured countries.
I find three trends related to the financing of scientific research endeavours particularly disturbing. Firstly, financial support of scientific research is already subjected to immense political control by a relatively small number of individuals with their own agendas. Secondly, there is growing bureaucracy at the institutional, national and international levels for the administration of research support such that less money is available at the end of the day to fund the proposed scientific research. Thirdly, because of all of the burden associated with reviewing small projects, granting agencies tend to prefer to fund larger scale projects. As a consequence, research is being focused and steered into specific directions that are politically expedient in the short term, less of the money earmarked for research support is actually getting to scientists, and there is less scrutiny per dollar spent on research that is funding a smaller proportion of principal investigators.
The newly minted Global Research Council has issued a very brief guideline that defines the six key principles of grant reviewing as expert assessment, transparency, impartiality, appropriateness, confidentiality, as well as integrity and ethical considerations. It seems to me that nowadays such aims have been standard stated policies for most granting agencies in developed countries for many decades. I don't understand why the heads of science and engineering funding agencies from approximately 50 countries or regions (primarily comprising the G20 and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries) had to get together at great expense to come up with such watered-down conclusions that are obvious or status quo. If such an organization gets more zealous in the future, I am worried that down the road, such consultations might result in lengthier, more onerous grant application guidelines that demand even more superfluous information from applicants and be yet more burdensome for reviewers.
Link to the original blog post
At first blush, the creation of the Global Research Council might seems like a good idea to harmonize the support and practices of scientific research around the world. However, I am not so sure that further politicization and standardization of scientific research is so desirable. While a strong case can be made for international funding of a few large scale projects for the common good, most research in academia and industry should be investigator-driven and collaborations should be dynamic and naturally arise from the science rather than the desires of politicians and bureaucrats to see further interactions with their favoured countries.
I find three trends related to the financing of scientific research endeavours particularly disturbing. Firstly, financial support of scientific research is already subjected to immense political control by a relatively small number of individuals with their own agendas. Secondly, there is growing bureaucracy at the institutional, national and international levels for the administration of research support such that less money is available at the end of the day to fund the proposed scientific research. Thirdly, because of all of the burden associated with reviewing small projects, granting agencies tend to prefer to fund larger scale projects. As a consequence, research is being focused and steered into specific directions that are politically expedient in the short term, less of the money earmarked for research support is actually getting to scientists, and there is less scrutiny per dollar spent on research that is funding a smaller proportion of principal investigators.
The newly minted Global Research Council has issued a very brief guideline that defines the six key principles of grant reviewing as expert assessment, transparency, impartiality, appropriateness, confidentiality, as well as integrity and ethical considerations. It seems to me that nowadays such aims have been standard stated policies for most granting agencies in developed countries for many decades. I don't understand why the heads of science and engineering funding agencies from approximately 50 countries or regions (primarily comprising the G20 and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries) had to get together at great expense to come up with such watered-down conclusions that are obvious or status quo. If such an organization gets more zealous in the future, I am worried that down the road, such consultations might result in lengthier, more onerous grant application guidelines that demand even more superfluous information from applicants and be yet more burdensome for reviewers.
Link to the original blog post