Will You Be Attending Experimental Biology 2014?

The good folks at the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics have seen fit to invite me to serve as an official blogger for the Experimental Biology 2014 meeting to be held in San Diego, CA, April 26-30. I will be joined in this effort by @katiesci who blogs at http://sicknessisfascinating.blogspot.com.

I would like to invite you, Dear Readers, to send me your presentation details, should you be attending this year. You can drop a note in the comments to this thread or send me an email (drugmnky at the google mail). I will try to stop by if it fits in my schedule and maybe blog it if I can understand what you do.

There may also be a meet up or two which revolves around either this community at the blog or my Twitter Tweeps. So stay in touch about that. If you are interested in such a thing and leave a comment, this may help to stimulate someone (say, me) to get off their behind and organize something.

Looking forward to seeing some of your science and to meeting some of you.

NIH backs down on resubmitting unfunded A1 grant applications

The rumors were true. NOT-OD-14-074says:

Effective immediately, for application due dates after April 16, 2014, following an unsuccessful resubmission (A1) application, applicants may submit the same idea as a new (A0) application for the next appropriate due date. The NIH and AHRQ will not assess the similarity of the science in the new (A0) application to any previously reviewed submission when accepting an application for review. Although a new (A0) application does not allow an introduction or responses to the previous reviews, the NIH and AHRQ encourage applicants to refine and strengthen all application submissions.

So, for all intents and purposes you can revise and resubmit your failed application endlessly. Maybe they will pick you up on the A6 or A7 attempt!

Sally Rockey has a blog entry up which gives a bit more background and rationale.

While the change in policy had the intended result of a greater number of applications being funded earlier,

I really wonder if she believes this or has to continue to parrot the company line for face saving reasons. There is no evidence this is true. Not until and unless she can show definitively that the supposed A0s being funded were not in fact re-workings of proposals that had been previously submitted. I continue to assert that a significant number of PIs were submitting “A0” applications that were directly and substantially benefited by having been previously reviewed in different guise.

As a result, we heard increasing concerns from the community about the impact of the policy on new investigators because finding new research directions can be quite difficult during this phase of their career.

If the true concern here was the ESI or NI, then they could have simply allowed them to pass the filter as a category.

The resubmission of an idea as new means the application will be considered without an association to a previous submission; the applicant will not provide an introduction to spell out how the application has changed or respond to previous reviews; and reviewers will be instructed to review it as a new idea even if they have seen it in prior cycles.

The only way this is remotely possible is to put it in a different study section and make sure there are no overlapping ad hocs. If they don’t do this, then this idea is nonsense. Surely Dr. Rockey is aware you cannot expect “instruction” to stick and force reviewers to behave themselves. Not with perfect fidelity.

However, we will monitor this new policy closely.

HA! If they’d decided to allow endless amendments (and required related apps to be submitted as such) then they would have been able to monitor the policy. The way they did this, there is no way to assess the impact. They will never know how many supposed “A0” apps are really A2, A4, A6, nor how many “A1” apps are really A3, A5, A7…etc. So what on earth could they possibly monitor? The number of established PIs who call up complaining about the unfundable score they just received on their A1?