NIH to Implement Overhaul of Peer Review. (June 7, 2008)

Last December and February TFW reported on moves by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to redesign its system for the peer review of it research grant proposals. The NIH has now announced the structure of the revised system based on recommendations to it by two panel's lead by  biochemist Keith Yamamoto, executive vice dean of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and Lawrence Tabak, director of NIH's National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research.

According to ScienceNOW:

NIH agreed with the panels on the need to shorten the application -- by more than half, from 25 pages to 12 -- and to emphasize the anticipated impact of the research over methods and other details. Applicants will also be given more explicit feedback on their proposals. To attract more reviewers, NIH will allow them to serve over 6 years rather than 4 years, test out online reviews to reduce travel (review committees currently meet in person), and give those who attend at least 18 meetings a grant supplement of up to $250,000, about as much as 1 year of an average grant. NIH also plans to have reviewers segregate the applications of young investigators from the rest of the pool and assign a different NIH-wide cutoff point for funding them so that at least 1500 a year are funded.

While the NIH did not accept the panels recommendation to to treat all applications as "new" (there is a perceived bias toward amended resubmitted applications -- the percentage of first-time applications funded has shrunk from 60% of the total pool to about 30%. since 2003), it plans to "carefully rebalance success rates among" the types of submissions so as to fund a larger portion of high-scoring grants on the first round.

Professor Yamamoto told ScienceNOW that while he is "disappointed" that NIH didn't follow all his group's suggestions "I'm basically happy with [the report]"

Surely, it would be more sensible for Senator Kim Carr as Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research to work toward an upgrading of the peer review system of the granting bodies, if the government's object is really to improve the mechanism of funding research grant proposals, rather than squandering millions on a faith-based ERA.