Cheaper to Skip Peer Review of Grants?
Are there better ways to administer grants? Certainly those who live with the stress of preparing long and detailed applications think so. Surely those who have sat on evaluation committees beside small mountains of applications agree.
Well, the case for an alternative system has been bolstered by Richard Gordon of the University of Manitoba and Bryan Poulin of Lakehead University, in a recent paper published in the most recent issue of Accountability in Research. They show that it would be cheaper for NSERC to fund every single qualified applicant with a discovery grant than it currently is to subject the applications to the review process. They use NSERC statistics from 2007, and show that the average cost of preparing, reviewing, and rejecting an application is $40,000. The cost of these rejections exceeds the cost of awarding them all the average discovery grant of $30,000. They suggest that simply providing direct baseline funding of $30,000 to all qualified applicants would save the government money, but would also provide advantages in more and better science, especially since these grants are for work at the “idea/discovery” stage.
As one who makes his living in part from writing grant applications, I’m not sure we want to eliminate the preparation of applications all together, mind…
The proposed system of flat funding to all qualified applicants
has been implemented in Switzerlands two elite universities,
which are world-class and ultraselective in their hires.
The negative of implementing this system in Canada is that
the number of requests for funding would proliferate, if the
entry barrier (i.e. risk of devoting preparation time to a
grant which has little hope of receiving funding) is lowered.