NSERC announces “new” Discovery Grants.
The government is really stepping up the PR campaign to convince everyone they’re big supporters of research. The government issued a press release this afternoon (emphasis added):
The Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology) announced new grants for Canada’s top researchers through the Discovery Grants Program (DGP), administered by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
These “new grants” they’re announcing are simply the results of this year’s DGP competition. I’m not sure that it’s normal procedure for the Minister to personally announce the results of a regular grant competition, especially the small-scale DGP. Despite the good news story that demonstrates just how much the government supports basic research, there is this cryptic and awkward description at the end of the announcement:
The budget for the Discovery Grants Program is $349.3 million. The amount of funding available per applicant in the 2009 competition was slightly higher than in 2008.
I couldn’t really figure out why they’d measure the funds ‘per applicant’, so I checked out the NSERC website, where I discovered a second news item which, unlike the one above, hadn’t been widely distributed by a leading newswire service. This second release is a nuts and bolts item about the DGP results, and much more in tune with the way these things are normally announced. No special appearance by the Minister, nor trumpeting of the government’s investment in research. In fact, the story’s headline is all about changes made to the peer review process for grant applications. Somewhere in the middle of the announcement were the details about funding for this round of grants:
The total budget for the DGP in 2009 was at the same level as in 2008. Per applicant, the total amount of funding available in the 2009 competition was slightly higher than in 2008. The percentage of applicants receiving a grant declined from 71 per cent in 2008 to 63.5 per cent this year. The overall average grant for successful individuals in the 2009 competition increased by over $4,000 per year compared to the 2008 Competition.
So, the budget was unchanged, and fewer people got grants. If, as was awkwardly stated in the press release, there was more funding available per applicant this year, this is simply because fewer people applied, and is hardly something the government should be congratulating itself about…
As an aside, the news item at the NSERC site describes the peer review system used for evaluating Discovery Grant applications. A short excerpt details part of the financial evaluation (never mind the scientific evaluation…):
Each application was independently rated on a “Relative cost of research” factor, with the options being “normal for the discipline” or higher or lower than the norm. Applicants with similar scores were aggregated into categories or “bins” of comparable overall quality. In the second step, the committees assigned a funding level to each bin, making the adjustments for the “Relative cost of research,” if needed.
Sounds like supporting evidence for abolishing the DGP review process to me. Publishing the details of their arcane review system while debate is rampant about whether the grants should be reviewed at all makes me wonder who’s doing the PR for these guys…
Not sure there were any less applicants than last year but a smaller fraction of the investigators that did apply received a grant. Still, 63% success is extremely high when compared to CIHR (20%) or NIH (6-9%). The NSERC web site is not very user friendly and there are no real statistics on the results, just the total. CIHR does a good comparative analysis of each competition and releases this information with the funding announcement (twice a year).
Interestingly, since the NSERC DGP result was delayed, universities have been bridging since the success rate is typically greater than 70%. Some people will be in debt.
Hi Jim,
My interpretation was that since the release states that there was more funding per applicant, but that the total funding was the same, there must have been fewer applicants.
Agreed about the lack of user-friendliness on the NSERC website – to see any numbers, you have to dig through pdf files with power point slides…