Reader Comments
Post a new comment on this article
Post Your Discussion Comment
Please follow our guidelines for comments and review our competing interests policy. Comments that do not conform to our guidelines will be promptly removed and the user account disabled. The following must be avoided:
- Remarks that could be interpreted as allegations of misconduct
- Unsupported assertions or statements
- Inflammatory or insulting language
Thank You!
Thank you for taking the time to flag this posting; we review flagged postings on a regular basis.
closeAn Implicit Parallel (Take it for Grant-ed)
Posted by plosmedicine on 31 Mar 2009 at 00:32 GMT
Author: Alexander Scheeline
Position: Professor of Chemistry
Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
E-mail: scheelin@scs.uiuc.edu
Submitted Date: October 28, 2008
Published Date: October 29, 2008
This comment was originally posted as a “Reader Response” on the publication date indicated above. All Reader Responses are now available as comments.
As with publication, even moreso with fund allocation. The implication of substituting "grant" for "article" and "program officer" for "editor" requires little additional modification to maintain a coherent editorial, yet the pitfalls of peer review, risk avoidance, herd mentality, and so on are familiar to many who seek research funding. I have often wondered if we took 50% of grant money and spent it on random proposals that were declined during review, 20 years later which would have been the better investment -- the approved or the "declined" proposals? Without spending money where we now don't, how do we have any empirical evidence that our peer review processes are acting in the interest of anyone other than bean counters, good ol' boys, and wordsmiths? Just as it is easier for a reviewer to block someone else's paper from publication than to write a good manuscript him/herself, so it is far easier to prevent someone else from getting funded than it is to obtain even modest resources for anything other than fashionable, partially-completed work.