"Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100% of qualified applicants for the same money. We anticipate that the net result would be more and better research since more research would be conducted at the critical idea or discovery stage. Control of quality is assured through university hiring, promotion and tenure proceedings, journal reviews of submitted work, and the patent process, whose collective scrutiny far exceeds that of grant peer review... We suggest that developing countries could leapfrog ahead by adopting from the start science grant systems that encourage innovation. " - Michael Nielsen

I am due for a grant renewal in 2011. I'd love an "automatic renewal". Actually, I'm not so afraid of losing my grant, as I am annoyed at having to present my work for "the next 5 years". No matter how seriously I compose my "research program", it becomes obselete extremely fast... sometimes within a single year. - Daniel Lemire

Our office of research is perplexed that grant submission rates are down for the past year. For those of us who write the proposals, the tradeoff is between "write a proposal with a < 20% chance of success" or "do some research and write a good paper". It is no wonder that the grant writing and reviewing process (particularly when money is tight) is a hugely underestimated cost. - Dan Gezelter

@Gezelter Absolutely. The cost of producing these research proposals is huge. I get some pressure from the research office to submit more funding proposals, but I became a professor to do research, not to write funding applications. - Daniel Lemire

requested a re-print of the full text from the authors.. - Cameron Neylon

Am I missing something (from the quickly scanned abstract alone... may be answering my own question there ;))? Surely if these grants were no longer peer reviewed there'd be much more of a demand for them - "may as well apply, it's free cash!" - and this finding would no longer hold true? - Euan

Euan - I wondered the same thing. There are many other questions one might have as well (how did they get the 40k estimate; who paid, since the money may be coming from separate places; who's eligible for the grants; etc). I don't have the full text, but I probably should get it. In any case, the question of the trade-off of cost vs benefit is a very interesting one. - Michael Nielsen

It's a pretty long article, but I did pick this out: "If more people who are eligible applied, this would either require an increase in the total budget or a decrease in the amount per grant. But either way the country would gain in scientific productivity since more new ideas and discoveries would be pursued. We may get a rough estimate of the number of eligible NSERC applicants by combining the number of faculty members in mathematics, the physical sciences, engineering and applied sciences, agriculture and biological sciences, which came to approximately 9,000 in 2006 in Canada (AUCC, 2007). Of these 9,000 potential grant applicants, only 3,258 applied to NSERC in 2006 (Table 2). If all of them were given baseline grants of $30,000 per year, the cost would be $270 million per year, or 11% of the Federal research budget (AUCC, 2008). As the present NSERC budget for Discovery Grants is $318.4 million (NSERC, 2008a), not counting special programs, baseline grants for all is an achievable goal, and in fact co - John Dupuis

It goes into a lot of detail with tables like: TABLE 3 Estimated costs of discovery grant peer review at NSERC, 2007 (). The number of people is based on table 2. Hours and salaries are estimated in the text. The number of hours per person is based on our personal experience and personal communications from NSERC staff. We assume two students or technicians helping per grant application, and two internal reviewers - John Dupuis

Thanks for that, John. 40k still seems high to me. I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation, and estimated it at closer to 10k, but I should look at the paper. - Michael Nielsen

My sister is a program officer at SSHRC (Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council for the non-Canadians), so I should ask her what she thinks. - John Dupuis

That $40k includes the cost of both peer review and grant preparation. If you take a broad view of full economic cost (I use a figure of £100k per academic per year average for the UK) and say a grant takes 2-4 weeks to prepare, then add some sundries for the peer review process I think you'd probably go close to $40k - Cameron Neylon

Cameron is right and that's what I was alluding to in my previous comments. For me, as a researcher, the preparation of a grant application to get *baseline support* (enough to buy computers, attend conferences...) is a time consuming process. They could merely review the work I did during the last 5 years and decide whether I am an active researcher (that can be done by trained admin technicians using objective criteria). But grant agencies don't pay the reviewers and the researchers who apply! Ah! - Daniel Lemire

Want a reprint? -Dick Gordon, gordonr@cc.umanitoba.ca - Richard Gordon Ph.D.