Well, well, well. As my more dedicated readers are well aware one of my ongoing criticisms of the peer review of NIH grants is the seeming obsession with revision status of the application. I’ve just reposted this old entry from 2007.
I was, quite naturally, sensitized to this issue originally as a grant applicant. As with many of you, I developed this sneaking suspicion that complaints and bad scores on the original submission of some of my proposals were not in good faith. I mean this in the usual sense that the same or essentially unchanged parts of the proposal were stomped on very hard on the first submission and essentially ignored later. Also from the growing realization that essentially none of my more-junior colleagues and friends had received an award un-revised.
Some years down the road, I entered service on a study section and in hearing the way grants of the three different revision steps were reviewed, well, I started to suspect.
What to do when recruitment promises evaporate?
November 6, 2009
As I have noted before, if there is one modal complaint of the newly hired Assistant Professor in the laboratory sciences…
…(i)t boils down to a failure of the hiring University to live up to the spirit (and even letter) of what was promised during the recruiting phase. The space that magically becomes “shared space”. The startup funds that get reduced or restricted. The surprises that one is supposed to pay for “out of your startup”. The new building renovations that are slow, “Oh just use this temporary space for now” becomes “Well, you have a lab we promised that to the next sucker”. Etc. The excuse is almost always “The dean won’t go for it”, “The dean denied it” and the like while the Chair insists s/he went to the mat for you. Everyone has problems doncha know….
This brings me to today’s edition of “Ask DrugMonkey”.
Repost: Preferential Funding for First Submissions of NIH Grants
November 6, 2009
I have a post I’m working on that references a topic I’ve been talking about on the blog for a long time. I was about to quote extensively from this one but I figured I’d just better repost the whole thing. This originally appeared on 10 Sep 2007.
I’ve made reference a time or two to what I describe as “bias” for amended (revised) applications. In the lifecycle of the standard, investigator initiated research project grant (the R01) application, it is initially submitted and reviewed and if not funded, the application can be revised/amended one (called the A1) or two (A2) times. (Thereafter the PI must submit a substantially new proposal.) First, the evidence that revised applications score better and are more likely to get funded relative to initial submissions is readily available.
DrugMonkey 