They Wanted Research Funding, So They Entered the Lottery

But will applicants continue to work so hard on lottery applications? Dr. Barnett suspects that as researchers become more familiar with the process, the time spent on such proposals may drop.

Other funders trying out lotteries include the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. The U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health say that they have not tested lotteries and don’t currently plan to do so.

“There is no strong evidence base to support the current dominant model of peer review, but we have until recently accepted that it’s possibly the best among a number of imperfect approaches,” said Sunny Collings, chief executive of New Zealand’s Health Research Council, who was not an author of the study. “Applications often have statistically indistinguishable scores, and there is a degree of randomness in peer review selection anyway. So why not formalize that and try to get the best of both approaches?”

Dr. Ponnampalam thinks money distributed using lotteries is a good opportunity for early and midcareer researchers, who often have a hard time attracting funding. The whole process is conducted anonymously, which hopefully means that ideas, not people, are funded, she says.

Dr. Barnett agrees: “Too often, we focus on what a researcher has done in the past than what they are proposing for the future.”

He also stresses that lotteries may help address biases against underrepresented groups in science.

However, Johan Bollen, a computer scientist at Indiana University, Bloomington, is not convinced by the use of lotteries, and is concerned that researchers would still bear the brunt of churning out endless grant applications, which can take up a lot of researchers’ time.

“Replacing final funding decisions with a lottery, while keeping most of the costly grant proposal machinery intact, seems profoundly misguided,” Dr. Bollen said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/science/research-funding-lotteries.html?emc=rss&partner=rss