Document Type
Article
Publication Title
F1000Research
Department
Biomedical Sciences
ISSN
20461402
Volume
11
Issue
3
DOI
10.12688/f1000research.124082.3
First Page
1
Last Page
35
Publication Date
2-21-2024
Abstract
The very low success rates of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are highly detrimental to the progress of science and the careers of scientists. The peer review process that evaluates proposals has been claimed arbitrarily to be the best there is. This consensus system, however, has never been evaluated scientifically against an alternative. Here we delineate the 15 major problems with the peer review process. We challenge the Science Advisor to the President, and the leadership of NIH, NSF, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and other funding agencies throughout the world to refute each of these criticisms. We call for the implementation of more equitable alternatives that will not constrain the progress of science. We propose a system that will fund at least 80,000 principal investigators, including young scientists, with about half the current NIH budget, seven-times as many as the current number of NIH "research project grants," and that will forego the cumbersome, expensive, and counterproductive "peer" review stage. Further, we propose that the success of the two systems over 5-10 years be compared scientifically.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Düzgüneş, Nejat, "'Science by consensus' impedes scientific creativity and progress: A simple alternative to funding biomedical research" (2024). Pacific Faculty Work. 219.
https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/all-faculty/219
