David's posting brings to mind two encounters I have had with NSF and US
funding practices. The first occurred when NSF sent me a proposal to review
which turned out to be a resubmission by an excellent research group on an
important topic. I was surprised that the proposal had not been accepted
right off the bat, but the cover letter indicated that the original
submission had been rejected because the reviewers felt that budgeting for
consultation with Canadian colleagues was unecessary, and all the relevnt
expertise could be found in the USA. I of course recommended acceptance, but
I added a note asking why this proposal was submitted to a Canadian
government scientist for review. I didn't receive an answer and was never
asked to review another NSF proposal.
The second encounter dealt with more fundamental issues. During the
Phiesteria outbreak a leading US researcher came to visit my institute and
asked if we would like to collaborate on research on this strange organism,
which has an incredibly complex life history. We discussed this at length
and came up with some ideas, but at the end he smiled and pointed out that
of course the US would not provide any funding for the work we did in our
foreign labs. Since Pfiesteria was a major problem in the US but not in
Canada, and since we already had our hands full dealing with domoic acid and
other phycotoxins we declined, but this business of asking people to work on
a well-funded problem for free seemed really bizarre.
This was of course many years ago, and perhaps the situation has changed,
but I always felt when I got an NSF proposal to review that it must have
come from another planet.
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Inouye" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: quinta-feira, 22 de Julho de 2010 16:23
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Fixing peer review
I have heard that the problem of finding reviewers has also been increasing
at NSF. They have had to find an increasing number of ad hoc reviewers and
panel members for the large increase in proposals that resulted from the
economic stimulus bill (one-time) funding and the low (about 10% I think)
funding rate (so many proposals are submitted multiple times). I've been
told that there are ecologists who have been well-funded by NSF for many
years who have never provided a review, and know that there have been
discussions at NSF about how to change that.
David Inouye (who will be an NSF program officer starting in September)
