Disallowed "Resubmissions"
January 14, 2014
Any of you fuckes who have repurposed an unfunded A1 into a new A0, I want to hear about whether your grant was accepted as a new grant or rejected as an impermissible resubmission. And I want all the motherfucken deets about what you changed etc etc etc.
DrugMonkey 
January 14, 2014 at 4:14 pm
I want to hear about this, too, regardless of whether it’s an R01 or whatever.
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January 14, 2014 at 4:26 pm
R01 accepted and (will be) funded on A0. Changed institutes, changed study sections, new prelim data and creatively reworded aims page, aims and title (eg sub bunny hopping for hare jumping).
Did you get rejected by the initial CSR review?
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January 14, 2014 at 4:53 pm
I assume you mean with in the same mechanism? I am about to do this across mechanisms.
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January 15, 2014 at 12:44 pm
I’m that fucke or is that a fuck?
Was told by PO that they want to see ‘a 50% difference’ from previous submission. This does not have to be that one goes from a biochemist to a behavior person (EWW!). It does mean, according to my PO, that I use a different paradigm or (get this) switch the emphasis.
My last A1 was very techniques driven because of the oh-so-important ‘novelty’ factor. My STRONG sense from my program officer is to couch that shitte in the grant, leaving the details to be glossed over for an example of how it worked. So instead of saying ‘Our new mass spec method will allow us to identify novel regulators of dopamine because- lookey here, we found receptors are linked to ER directly’ I should now say ‘we want to study the dopamine complex under conditions of chronic drug treatment’ and then, oh by the way, we are doing a state of the art thing to make it happen and oh, ER are attached. This is not, in my opinion fundamentally different.
So I specifically asked, “even if I’m using the same Aim and making it more biology and less ‘hey this cool technique will redefine our understanding of dopamine signaling’ – is THAT a 50% change?” Absolutely was her answer. And, she suggested, can I dumb things down for the study section and include some cartoons because they really do like me for their SS and want to fund my work. I sent her my revised aims prior to submitting, she saw no problem.
Now the A0 is being reviewed. Also, FTR, I don’t study dopamine. I just like to modulate mine with as many extrinsic factors as I can.
Am I still a fuck? Fucke?
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January 15, 2014 at 12:46 pm
Oh shit…..I didn’t notice this was physioprof until I posted. The “fuck” thing should have been a give away. Hi Peanut!
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January 15, 2014 at 4:19 pm
I did it and it was accepted and will be reviewed in Feb. I changed the title, rewrote the abstract, rewrote the specific aims page to read very differently, broadened the scope of aim 1 to be general rather than focused on a specific example, moved aim 3 to be aim 2 because we’d accomplished the stuff originally proposed for aims one and two, added a new aim focused on a different biological system, and just generally rewrote and reorganized a lot of the content.
It was a pretty comprehensive rewrite of the proposal, but is still the same project. I addressed all the reviewers’ comments without making it obvious (because that’s a red flag at csr apparently). Sort of just like “here’s the proposal I WOULD have written if I had known what you people wanted and had this preliminary data last time.”
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January 15, 2014 at 5:33 pm
Who the fucken fucke is “peanut”?!
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January 16, 2014 at 7:08 am
As I’ve said before, this A0, A1 stuff is bullshit and a massive waste of time for the NIH to enforce this stupid fuckin useless rule.
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January 18, 2014 at 7:58 pm
I was told the same thing as BAM. To change the emphasis, so now I have anew conceptual model, which just happens to be tested by the techniques we weremusing in the previous submission.
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January 19, 2014 at 4:55 am
Cross-posted from the other discussion:
Are people sending their repurposed grants (A2s masquerading as A0s) to the same study section? Has anyone on a study section seen an A2 masquerading as an A0? Did it get a good score?
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January 19, 2014 at 7:01 am
I send the same approximate topic to at least three different study sections. Maybe four. All new and/or revisions are in some way influenced by prior reviews. And, as always, having these opportunities for repeated discussions with the study section influences them. So you can see comments evolve as well.
I’ve had supposed “A0” apps get funded in recet years that had been reviewed 2 times before in different guise. My review service is spottier now but you still hear reviewer comments that they’ve seen a given “A0” before.
I suspect you “see no evidence” because you don’t want to see it.
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January 20, 2014 at 3:36 am
If you are sending the same ideas to four study sections then you are depending on the lottery method not treating an A0 as an A2. Using the comments from other reviewers to inform your proposals is smart, but is not treating an A0 as an A2. The point of the A2 was that you were sending the same grant to the same reviewers so that you could address their issues. Treating an A0 as an A2 would entail changing the A1 grant minimally (enough to get past CSR) and specifically addressing comments by a specific study section so that those reviewers would be happy.
While I am sure this happens, I think it is extremely rare. I am currently doing a lot of reviewer service for NIH and I have never seen any cases of it. What I have seen (which you could argue is similar) is A0s not coming back, and instead new A0s from the same PI coming back that are completely different. As if some people are sending a sequence of A0s to the same study section until they get close enough to try a second time for an A1. I think this is also a form playing the lottery (sequential rather than parallel) and is still not the “work through the reviewers comments until they’re happy” process.
My point is that the lottery system has a fundamental flaw that the air traffic control delay system did not. Are you prepared for the situation should all four of your four proposals get funded? And suddenly your lab has to metastasize? (This has happened to people I know. It has not been pretty.)
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January 20, 2014 at 2:46 pm
qaz:
As a reviewer, do you prefer to see PIs give the A1 a shot after a poorly scored A0, or do you think they are making a good move by restructuring the proposal into a new A0? I have not read much about reviewer attitudes regarding this specifically.
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January 21, 2014 at 2:59 am
It depends on the study section and the reviews. If you can answer the reviewers’ issues, then I would definitely resubmit. I have seen lots of grants go from poor scores on the A0 to great scores on the A1. But if you can’t, I would not assume that the A1 would be scored better because it’s a resubmission (a revision).
Score on an A0 is no longer (if it ever was) a signal of the likelihood of the A1 being fundable. Score on an A0 is simply a measure (noisy measure) of “impact” (which is supposed to be quality + importance, but is really more like “worth-funding-or-not”).
This goes both ways. A good (non-fundable) score on an A0 does not imply a better score the next round. You have to answer the reviewers’ issues.
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