In a memorandum of understanding that was signed today, the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation agreed to work cooperatively to support social-science research on topics of interest to the Pentagon.

As widely expected, the NSF has agreed to help review proposals submitted to the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative, a fledgling program that will offer grants to university-based scholars to study the Chinese military, the records of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and other specific topics.

The two agencies will soon — possibly within a week — release a joint request for Minerva-related proposals. Those proposals will be judged by the NSF’s typical merit-review panels, though both the science foundation and the Pentagon will have the right to nominate experts to serve on those panels. (The Pentagon is also accepting Minerva proposals through a separate pathway known as a broad agency announcement. Proposals that are submitted via this second track will reviewed through the Defense Department’s usual processes, not by NSF panels.)

But today’s agreement is broader than Minerva: It also creates a mechanism through which the Department of Defense can help to finance other national-security-related proposals submitted to the NSF. In such cases, scholars will have the option to decline the Pentagon’s money.

“We’re delighted,” said David W. Lightfoot, the NSF’s assistant director for social, behavioral, and economic sciences, in an interview. “We’ve always been concerned to do research that helps to secure the national defense. That’s part of the NSF’s charter. This new agreement will allow the Department of Defense to help us to do more of that kind of work, subject to the usual NSF merit-review process.”

Mark L. Weiss, the NSF’s division director for behavioral and cognitive sciences, said that Minerva projects would meet the agency’s usual standards of transparency. “All of the work that we will be supporting will be unclassified,” he said. “And there will be no constraints at all on the researchers’ freedom to publish results.”

Some scholars have expressed deep skepticism about the Minerva initiative. In an essay published last week, David H. Price, an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at St. Martin’s University, warned that military-financed social science would crowd out other forms of academic inquiry. (This week’s Chronicle Review contains a selection of opinions on Minerva.) —David Glenn