Gordon & Polin wrote: "In summary, we recommend that fair minded and practical government, business, and science agents work together to conduct a ‘natural experiment’ to test our hypothesis: innovation will be increased by the elimination of peer review at the idea/discovery stage." There is a grant proposal scheme (up to 50,000 Euro in the pilot phase, up to 1,000,000 in the second phase) that could allow for such a natural experiment with minimal time delay, though on a much smaller budget scale, with the following configuration (or similar): ... - Daniel Mietchen from Bookmarklet

Sounds great in principle. I'm not sure what can be done with $1000 though. Might it be better to reduce to four projects with $10,000? or eight with $5000? e.g. a summer student here for three months will cost around £4000 just in salary and associated costs. - Cameron Neylon

To graduate students and to some extent postdocs, even small amounts can be a big help in testing their own ideas. I got three such small-scale grants during my PhD, each resulting in a paper. If we reduce the number of projects too much, the outcome of the test won't tell us much about the benefits or pitfalls of doing away with anterior peer review on such grants. - Daniel Mietchen

That is fair but but what is the money expected to pay for? And how much will this be things that would have been done anyway? Might also be some cultural differences here in the way PhDs/postdocs are run in different countries. Don't want to discourage, just trying to test the idea - Cameron Neylon

Testing the suggestions is certainly needed! The beauty of a no-strings-attached proposal is that the money can be used for anything, and I would leave it up to the blog posts to point out how the funds have been used to do things that otherwise would not have been done - visible sidestepping would thus have to be considered in the post-hoc assessment. It could also be somewhat enforced if a one-page proposal were to be submitted before requesting the grant allocation. - Daniel Mietchen

Page title is "Europe and Global Challenges" - Richard Akerman

Yes, and proper research grant allocation does probably qualify as both a European and a Global challenge. - Daniel Mietchen

The motivation behind going for graduate students here is at least two-fold: (i) their potential of doing good research is usually assumed to be lower than that of tenured faculty, so if the test I propose works produces some good research on this small funding basis, it would make a strange case for doing away with baseline grant review for tenured faculty, as suggested by Gordon and Poulin. - Daniel Mietchen

(ii) they might spend much less than their entire scientific life in a world with the current peer review systems ( http://friendfeed.com/e... ). - Daniel Mietchen

One of the authors of this study is now on friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/dickgor... - Björn Brembs