A new grant-proposal process adopted by biological divisions of the National Science Foundation could cripple junior faculty, stymie collaborative projects, and slow the progress of science, according to the more than 550 ecologists and environmental scientists who signed and delivered a letter to the federal agency this week.
The new process, announced in August 2011 by the NSF’S Directorate for Biological Sciences, was decried by scientists for providing just one grant cycle per year instead of two, and capping the number of proposals a lead researcher can submit at two.
Officials at the directorate said the changes were intended to rescue a process that they and many protesting scientists saw as nearing a breaking point, overburdening grant reviewers within the affected fields as well as the agency’s staff.
Both sides say they are optimistic of finding better solutions, some of which could come into effect before the next cycle starts in January. Doing so, the scientists wrote in the letter, is critical to “ensure that science progresses as rapidly as possible given the level of funds available, thereby providing maximum benefit to society.”
Harmful Effects
The NSF, which now has an annual federal budget of $7.3-billion, is the primary source of funds for scientists and engineers working in nonmedical fields. The Directorate for Biological Sciences is one of seven research-supporting directorates within the NSF, and the grant-review changes affect divisions within the directorate that oversee ecology, environmental science, and related disciplines.
Before the new review process took effect this year, those divisions reviewed full proposals for projects twice a year, without limits on how many proposals a researcher could submit each cycle. Limitless proposals allowed researchers to collaborate freely on interdisciplinary projects, which many scientists feel is critical for solving complex scientific challenges. And with two review cycles a year, researchers could receive feedback from the panel of select scientists who review each submission and respond and resubmit within a year to reviewers’ suggestions.
The more grant-writing practice, the better, said David A. Baltrus, an assistant professor of microbial evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, and a signer of the letter to the NSF.
Sarah E. Hobbie, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the letter, said having two review cycles a year gave researchers “a chance to respond to these previous reviews and say, ‘We’ve addressed this concern in such and such a way.’”
But the new process will significantly cut down on such feedback and improvement.
Under the new process, researchers submit a four-page preliminary proposal in January and, if invited, submit a full, 15-page proposal in August for review. A lead researcher can be named on only two preliminary proposals per year. The result, according to many researchers, is not only fewer opportunities for reviews and collaborative projects, but also a lag-time in receiving federal money, with potentially negative consequences for projects and careers.
If a researcher submitted a preproposal in January of this year, was invited to submit a full proposal in August, and then won a grant, the person wouldn’t see a penny until around January of 2013—a full year from the original submission. For the vast majority of researchers who don’t make it past the preproposal stage, they would have to wait until January of 2013 to revise and resubmit a proposal for funds. That would mean that, at best, they wouldn’t get NSF funds until January of 2014, two years after their initial submission.
For young faculty members such as Mr. Baltrus, who has one year before his university’s internal start-up funds run out and three years before he’s up for his tenure evaluation, such a gap in support from the NSF could be injurious to his career.
“You can have full research programs go under in two years,” said a professor of evolutionary biology who blogs under the name Prof-Like Substance. He asked to remain anonymous so he could continue to write blog posts without fear of retribution, particularly on topics involving his grant sources.
A ‘Work In Progress’
Ms. Hobbie and the other authors of the letter to the NSF laid out broad recommendations for how to improve the process. They suggested more submission cycles per year and removing the cap on submissions by the same lead researcher.
But that might bring the NSF right back to the problems it started with.
In the past decade, the NSF has seen a jump of more than 40 percent in proposal submissions, while the amount of money the agency has to distribute has remained mostly flat. “Such increases generated a significant burden on NSF staff and external reviewers,” the NSF wrote in a statement in response to questions from The Chronicle. In the NSF statement, the current proposal process is referred to as a “work in progress.”
It’s not a new problem, said John C. Wingfield, associate director of the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences. “I first served on a panel for NSF in 1982, and a lot of the issues that are a concern now were a concern then,” he said. But in the past three years, the NSF hit a tipping point where it was struggling to get reviews done in time for researchers to resubmit grants.
The Prof-Like Substance blogger, who has also served on NSF panels, said in an interview that he was shocked by how small a percentage of researchers in the ecology and evolutionary-biology fields would review grants. “For the program directors, it’s a huge amount of work to cobble together reviews.”
Though the Prof-Like Substance blogger is just as critical of the new process as his peers, he sees weakness in the opposition letter and its suggested way forward. “You can complain all you want, but you have to come back with some reasonable suggestions.” Otherwise, he said, “you’re just putting it right back in NSF’s lap to fix.”
Ms. Hobbie and her co-authors disagree. “I want to emphasize that this is a real problem that the NSF is facing,” she said. “We intentionally tried not to be prescriptive. We didn’t want to do what the NSF did; we want to enter a dialogue.”
This may have been what the NSF wanted all along. Mr. Wingfield said he expected the letter and is preparing a reply, in which he plans to invite the scientists to help the NSF make improvements to the process.
The NSF is compiling the data on the first grant cycle of the new process, Mr. Wingfield said, and agency officials will meet this fall and talk with scientists on possible improvements. He said he plans to start a wiki or blog of the data and suggestions. “We’re going to work with them,” he said. “But I think there are some fairly obvious tweaks that we can make quickly.”
Though this was always his intention, he said, the letter showed that scientists understand that something had to change in how the old process worked. It also helped identify the fields’ priorities and aspects of the process that need improvement, including keeping young faculty from suffering.
“They are the future of fundamental science in the U.S. and the world,” said Mr. Wingfield. “We’re doing our damn best to make sure that doesn’t happen.”