Research funding goes to rich clubs

Alternative models of funding curiosity-driven research

Funding of curiosity-driven science is the lifeblood of scientific and technological innovation. Various models of funding allocation became institutionalized in the 20th century, shaping the present landscape of research funding. There are numerous reasons for scientists to be dissatisfied with current funding schemes, including the imbalance between funding for curiosity-driven and mission-directed research, regional and country disparities, path-dependency of who gets funded, gender and race disparities, low inter-reviewer reliability, and the trade-off between the effort and time spent on writing or reviewing proposals and doing research. We discuss possible alternative models for dealing with these issues. These alternatives include incremental changes such as placing more weight on the proposals or on the investigators and representative composition of panel members, along with deeper reforms such as distributed or concentrated funding and partial lotteries in response to low inter-reviewer reliability. We also consider radical alternatives to current funding schemes: the removal of political governance and the introduction of international competitive applications to a World Research Council alongside national funding sources. There is likely no single best way to fund curiosity-driven research; we examine arguments for and against the possibility of systematically evaluating alternative models empirically.

Higher-order rich-club phenomenon in collaborative research grant networks

Modern scientific work, including writing papers and submitting research grant proposals, increasingly involves researchers from different institutions. In grant collaborations, it is known that institutions involved in many collaborations tend to densely collaborate with each other, forming rich clubs. Here we investigate higher-order rich-club phenomena in networks of collaborative research grants among institutions and their associations with research impact. Using publicly available data from the National Science Foundation in the US, we construct a bipartite network of institutions and collaborative grants, which distinguishes among the collaboration with different numbers of institutions. By extending the concept and algorithms of the rich club for dyadic networks to the case of bipartite networks, we find rich clubs both in the entire bipartite network and the bipartite subnetwork induced by the collaborative grants involving a given number of institutions up to five. We also find that the collaborative grants within rich clubs tend to be more impactful in a per-dollar sense than the control. Our results highlight advantages of collaborative grants among the institutions in the rich clubs.

Peer review in funding-by-lottery: A systematic overview and expansion

Despite the surging interest in introducing lottery mechanisms into decision-making procedures for science funding bodies, the discourse on funding-by-lottery remains underdeveloped and, at times, misleading. Funding-by-lottery is sometimes presented as if it were a single mechanism when, in reality, there are many funding-by-lottery mechanisms with important distinguishing features. Moreover, funding-by-lottery is sometimes portrayed as an alternative to traditional methods of peer review when peer review is still used within funding-by-lottery approaches. This obscures a proper analysis of the (hypothetical and actual) variants of funding-by-lottery and important differences amongst them. The goal of this article is to provide a preliminary taxonomy of funding-by-lottery variants and evaluate how the existing evidence on peer review might lend differentiated support for variants of funding-by-lottery. Moreover, I point to gaps in the literature on peer review that must be addressed in future research. I conclude by building off of the work of Avin in moving toward a more holistic evaluation of funding-by-lottery. Specifically, I consider implications funding-by-lottery variants may have regarding trust and social responsibility.

Interprofessional grant writing seminar for early career faculty in a small, isolated teaching center

Small, isolated teaching centers have difficulty mentoring interprofessional junior faculty in research methods and grant writing. Peer mentoring programs for grant writing at larger institutions have been successful. In this short report, we describe our program that leveraged mentor experience using four framing seminars followed by project refinement in three-person peer groups and monthly mentored works in progress meetings. In its first year, ten faculty from medicine, psychology, and pharmacy completed the program and successfully obtained six funded grants. Five of the projects transitioned from single profession applications to interprofessional applications as participants connected and profession-specific expertise was identified. Refinements for future cohorts are discussed.

Funding acknowledgements in scientific publications: A literature review

The topic of acknowledgements has produced abundant research since the 1970s, though, as previous studies point out, the value of acknowledgements has not yet been demonstrated and further research is limited by lack of conceptualization. This study focuses on funding acknowledgements (FAs), considering that funding represents an important input in the scientific process. In this context, 183 scientific publications retrieved from Scopus from the 1970s until June 2020 were analyzed, with the aim of systematizing conceptually this body of research and contributing to a theory of acknowledgements. Results are summarized into the following main themes: the meaning of FAs; data sources for acknowledgements; the process of funding; association of funding with productivity, impact, and collaboration; and other aspects affected by funding. The literature reviewed shows that a theory of acknowledgements based on the reward triangle, as in previous studies, is unable to capture the extreme complexity of the scientific activity affecting and being affected by FAs. Funding bodies appear as clear and influential actors in the scientific communication system, making important decisions on the research that is supported, and influencing the type of knowledge produced. Funding agencies hold a responsibility regarding the data that they may collect on their programs, as well as the normalization policies they need to develop so that funded authors can reference with less ambiguity the financial source of their projects. Finally, the need to assess the impact of research funding beyond the scientific community that is, the societal impact, is also addressed.

Interprofessional grant writing seminar for early career faculty in a small, isolated teaching center

Small, isolated teaching centers have difficulty mentoring interprofessional junior faculty in research methods and grant writing. Peer mentoring programs for grant writing at larger institutions have been successful. In this short report, we describe our program that leveraged mentor experience using four framing seminars followed by project refinement in three-person peer groups and monthly mentored works in progress meetings. In its first year, ten faculty from medicine, psychology, and pharmacy completed the program and successfully obtained six funded grants. Five of the projects transitioned from single profession applications to interprofessional applications as participants connected and profession-specific expertise was identified. Refinements for future cohorts are discussed.

The effect of competitive public funding on scientific output: A comparison between China and the EU

Public funding is believed to play an important role in the development of science and technology. However, whether public funding and, in particular, competitive funding from public agencies actually helps to increase scientific output (i.e. publications) remains a matter of debate. By analysing a dataset of co-publications between China and the EU and a dataset of joint project collaborations in European Framework Programs for Research and Innovation [FP7 and Horizon 2020 (H2020)], we investigate whether different public funding agencies’ competitive assets have different impact on the volume of publication output. Our results support the hypotheses that competitively funded research output varies by funding sources, so that a high level of funding does not necessarily lead to high scientific output. Our results show that FP7/H2020 funded projects do not have a positive contribution to the output of joint publications between China and the EU. Interestingly, cooperation in the form of jointly writing proposals to these EU programmes, especially when they are not granted by the European Commission, can contribute significantly to joint scientific publications in a later stage. This applies in particular to cases where funding from China is involved. Our findings highlight the key role that funding agencies play in influencing research behaviour. Our results indicate that Chinese funding triggers a high number of publications, whereas research funded by the EU does so to a much lower extent, arguably due to the EU’s strong focus on social impact and its funding schemes as tools to promote European integration.