NIH Peer Review Under Review - First Draft. (February 23, 2008)

Last December TFW reported that the US' National Institutes of Health (NIH) peer review system was under critical scrutiny while a similar simultaneous assessment was taking

 place at Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council.

Now the NIH has received a 78-page draft report of recommendations, put forward by an internal working group of senior NIH officials and another of external scientists.   Biochemist Keith Yamamoto, executive vice dean of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and Lawrence Tabak, director of the NIH’s dental institute co-chaired the panels.

Currently, a grant proposal can take 18 months to pass through procedures which NIH director Elias Zerhouni describes as a system "that rewards persistence over brilliance sometimes."

According to Nature's Meredith Wadman:

Applicants would... no longer have to respond to reviewers’ comments as part of their second or third attempts with the same application. Nor would reviewers considering amended applications any longer see previous reviewers’ comments. That way, they “will not be biased in any way by any prior review”, says Lawrence Tabak.

Other recommendations include substantially shortening the 25-page applications by minimizing the preliminary data and methodological detail required. They say that the NIH should consider reviewing early-career investigators in a separate pool against each other, rather than throwing them up against established veterans. And they advise that the poorest-quality applications (not just early-career ones) should be bluntly coded NRR — “not recommended for resubmission”.

Dr Zerhouni after after consultation and considering of the recommendations, intends to assemble within the next two months a team to develop methods to implement those recommendations accepted.