Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Eur J Neurosci. 2023 Dec;58(12):4441-4448. doi: 10.1111/ejn.15818. Epub 2022 Oct 3.
Receiving research grants is among the highlights of an academic career, affirming previous accomplishments and enabling new research endeavours. Much of the process of acquiring research funding, however, belongs to the less favourite duties of many researchers: It is time consuming, often stressful and, in the majority of cases, unsuccessful. This resentment towards funding acquisition is backed up by empirical research: The current system to distribute research funding, via competitive calls for extensive research applications that undergo peer review, has repeatedly been shown to fail in its task to reliably rank proposals according to their merit, while at the same time being highly inefficient. The simplest, fairest and broadly supported alternative would be to distribute funding more equally across researchers, for example, by an increase of universities' base funding, thereby saving considerable time that can be spent on research instead. Here, I propose how to combine such a 'funding flat rate' model-or other efficient distribution strategies-with quality control through postponed, non-competitive peer review using open science practices.
获得研究经费是学术生涯的亮点之一，这肯定了之前的成就，并为新的研究工作提供了资金。然而，获得研究资金的过程很大程度上属于许多研究人员不太喜欢的职责：既耗时，又常常带来压力，而且在大多数情况下，努力都是徒劳的。这种对资金获取的不满得到了实证研究的支持：目前通过竞争性的广泛研究申请和同行评审来分配研究资金的系统一再未能成功地根据其优点可靠地对提案进行排名，同时效率也非常低。最简单、最公平、最广泛支持的替代方案是更平等地在研究人员之间分配资金，例如，通过增加大学的基础资金，从而节省大量可以用于研究的时间。在这里，我提出如何将这种“资金定额”模式或其他有效的分配策略与通过使用开放科学实践进行推迟的、非竞争性的同行评审相结合，以实现质量控制。
