The National Institutes of Health will draw up a plan by mid-April to revamp its peer-review process for awarding grants for biomedical research, its director, Elias A. Zerhouni, said today. The overhaul will be based on recommendations approved in draft form today by his advisory committee.
They include slashing the length of grant applications and placing more weight in grant reviews on the scientific effects of the proposed research. Those ideas largely parallel a preliminary set of suggestions unveiled in December by a task force, which is to complete a report by the end of February.
The recommendations came from a yearlong self-examination by the NIH in response to wide-ranging complaints among academic researchers about its grant review. Many believe the process is too conservative and time-consuming, spotty in quality, and insufficiently supportive of young scientists and clinical research.
Among the draft report’s recommendations for immediate action were that NIH peer reviewers offer applicants a blunt “No, thanks, ever” if their ideas are unlikely to ever win agency financing. The existing system instead encourages resubmittals, which bog down the review process.
In general, the draft report spells out goals but not all details for getting there. For example, although the report endorses lowering the NIH’s limit on the length of grant applications, now 25 pages, it does not say by how much.
The task force also recommended only further study, but no immediate action, on other ideas urged by some scientists during a public-comment process last year. Among those ideas are that the NIH review grant applications from young investigators separately from those sent by more-experienced scientists. That approach could improve the younger applicants’ poorer rate of success in winning grants.
Another deferred topic was how to ensure stable financing over time for “soft money” researchers, who depend entirely on NIH grants because they draw no salary from the universities where they work. —Jeffrey Brainard
