Rethink funding!?
Every funding agency, be it the German (DFG), Swiss (SNF), British (Wellcome Trust), US American (NIH), Chinese (NSFC), or French (ANR) research foundation, has its own scheme on how to allocate research funding to the researchers. And research funding determines what is considered good science, it controls future science, and it shapes future knowledge.
However, meta-science research increasingly shows that funding allocation is inherently biased, leads to non-optimal outcomes, and is very costly (Boytchev 2023; Taffe and Gilpin 2021).
In the present Commentary, we introduce a Shiny app to allow researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies to simulate the effects of different funding scenarios, e.g., lotteries as a “tiebreaker” (Nature editorial 2022) in the final decision round or classic funding schemes (e.g., R01, ERC), on costs, diversity, and quality.
We urge funding agencies, such as the DFG, NIH, Volkswagen Stiftung, or ERC to increase the transparency of their funding allocation process and to simulate the potential outcomes of their idiosyncratic grant schemes in advance for their potential to increasing diversity in grant allocation.
The GrantInq application can be found at https://osi-luebeck.shinyapps.io/GrantInq/
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The comment, ”Rethink funding by putting the lottery first,” by Finn Luebber, Sören Krach, Marina Martinez Mateo, Frieder Paulus, Lena Rademacher, Rima-Maria Rahal, Jule Specht was published online June 22, 2023 in Nature Human Behaviour; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01649-y