Braun Tibor, Schubert András (szerk.): Szakértői bírálat (peer review) a tudományos kutatásban : Válogatott tanulmányok a téma szakirodalmából (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 7., 1993)

EUGENE GARFIELD: Refereeing and Peer Review. Part 4. Research on the Peer Review of Grant Proposals and Suggestions for Improvement

35 GARFIELD: REFEREEING AND PEER REVIEW, PART 1 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, found that independent mail reviewers had little impact on the final rating given to a proposal by panel reviewers.

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9 Suggestions for Further Change and Improvement As I mentioned earlier, both the NSF and the NIH have instituted changes in their review procedures over the last few years. Nevertheless, there are plenty of suggestions for changing the system. Unfortunately, since so little empirical data exist, most of these suggestions are little more than remedies for perceived ills. It is hard to know which ones are worth implementing without further research. One suggested change concerns the time and effort consumed by writing proposals and filling out forms. Typical of many scientists' feelings is a remark attributed to Nobel laureate biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986). In an article published in Chemical & Engineering News, science journalist Howard J. Sanders reports that Szent-Györgyi once remarked that writing grant proposals filled his "scientific life with agony."

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0 Rosalyn S. Yalow, Veterans Administration, New York, the 1977 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine, suggests that researchers of demonstrated ability should not have to go through the process of making a formal application year after year for the renewal of funding.

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1 Instead, they should receive a constant level of funding that is renewable every three years, subject to review of their progress.

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2 Rustum Roy, director, Science, Technology and Society Program, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, also wants research funding to be based on an investigator's performance.

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3 But in a departure from other scholars' suggestions, he proposes a formula, "based on three kinds of post-hoc peer review,"

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4 on which to base grants to individuals, university departments (or research units of a similar size), and institutions.

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6 Roy claims his peer-review formula would eliminate the subjective elements of allocating grant money and does not tie funds to specific projects; instead, money would be administered at the departmental level and would be distributed based on a researcher's past performance, rather than on future promise (with allowances to be made for new or young investigators without track records).

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6 Henry R. Hirsch, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, College of Medicine, University of Kentucky, Lexington, also proposed that all active faculty members ought to receive funding, varying to reflect the administration's judgment concerning "the costs and merits of different kinds of research."

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7 Roy's proposal met with considerable individual criticism. In a number of letters written in reply to his original editorial in Science,

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3 various scientists expressed misgivings about jettisoning the "informed judgment"

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8 and the concern with quality that they feel are intrinsic to peer review in its present form.

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0 But in his reply, Roy says these objections assume that peer review "is in some mysterious way linked witti the progress of science" and that the process can accurately predict the quality of research not yet performed. Roy states that both claims are totally unsupported.

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1 Another funding alternative to peei review, supported by a "small but vocal number of scientists," as Sanders puts it,

20 involves block grants, a system common throughout Europe,

3 in which funds are awarded to a research institution for allocation as it sees fit. The money would not go directly to an individual; instead, distribution would be determined by department heads or administrative officials. But Sanders notes that most US scientists strongly oppose a block-grant system, in the belief that a department head or administrative official or committee is less qualified to decide how to allocate research funds than an expert peer-review group.

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0 Moreover, according to Joshua Lederberg, president, Rockefeller University, a block-grant system