Some academic departments have internal sources of funding to keep the research programs of their faculty limping along if the PI experiences a gap in extramural funding. This is great. It can be a bit of an issue, however, trying to decide who deserves the (most) money.
One way to look at that is as an investment strategy. Your mini-state Department of -ology might be smartest to invest the internal funds in that laboratory that has a chance of regaining extramural funds in short order.
Odyssey has a few thoughts in Bridges to Nowhere:
Many, including myself, would like to see “actively” and “recent” quantified. The current popular suggestion is that recipients need to have submitted at least two proposals in the last twelve months. I don’t think that’s enough. I would make it at least three in the last six months. I’m not necessarily talking about NIH R01-level proposals here. Pretty much anything that would help keep a lab going should count. I don’t see this as too onerous a burden for someone with a viable research program.
Go read and comment.
The font geeks are still battling it out and a recent comment on that thread got me thinking about readability. Even with the considerable limitations of Microsoft Word and my own skills with it, I’ve been able to insert figures more or less where I want them in my grant applications for years. Over a decade.
Most of the grants that I review seem to be able to manage that as well. To place and format the figures within the document text so as to, presumably, ease the job of the reviewer in apprehending the points being made. The point is to facilitate easy reference to the illustrative figure at the appropriate place in the text.
Yet manuscript review is still stuck in the dark ages. Most journal submission procedures I am familiar with still require the figures to be separate documents from the text. The figures are then appended to the back of the file when the online submission engine creates the final pdf.
Why? Why do we do this? Why not allow the authors to format the manuscript in a pdf with the figures inserted as the authors feel best? If necessary high-resolution figures could be required to be appended and the publisher could even require a parallel figure-free copy of the manuscript text for their own typesetting purposes.
The font geeks are still battling it out and a recent comment on that thread got me thinking about readability. Even with the considerable limitations of Microsoft Word and my own skills with it, I’ve been able to insert figures more or less where I want them in my grant applications for years. Over a decade.
Most of the grants that I review seem to be able to manage that as well. To place and format the figures within the document text so as to, presumably, ease the job of the reviewer in apprehending the points being made. The point is to facilitate easy reference to the illustrative figure at the appropriate place in the text.
Yet manuscript review is still stuck in the dark ages. Most journal submission procedures I am familiar with still require the figures to be separate documents from the text. The figures are then appended to the back of the file when the online submission engine creates the final pdf.
Why? Why do we do this? Why not allow the authors to format the manuscript in a pdf with the figures inserted as the authors feel best? If necessary high-resolution figures could be required to be appended and the publisher could even require a parallel figure-free copy of the manuscript text for their own typesetting purposes.
DrugMonkey 