[naturenews] from [nature.com]
[naturenews]
Published online 4 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/460671a
News
Greek scientists fight research shake-up
Protests greet plans to dismantle multidisciplinary institutions.
Alison Abbott
Instead of enjoying a tranquil summer break, Greek researchers are fighting a major reorganization that will carve up two of the country's largest research centres.
Filippos Tsalidis, head of the development ministry's office for research and technology, took the scientific community by surprise by announcing the changes, intended to promote efficiency, in the business newspaper Naftemporiki on 3 June.
He plans to reshape research institutes overseen by his ministry, turning some into single-discipline centres and uniting smaller institutes in the south and north of the country into two regional centres.
Two major multidisciplinary research centres in Athens — the National Centre for Scientific Research Demokritos and the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF) — will be partly dismantled. In 2001 and 2005, panels of international experts commissioned by the Greek government judged research at these centres to be poor, although improving in parts.
Greek scientists, angry at not being consulted about the restructuring, say it will cost more than it saves, is at odds with current multidisciplinary scientific trends, and will not solve the problem of underperforming research units. The plans have sparked public demonstrations, petitions and newspaper campaigns.
The opposition socialist party has pledged to reverse the reorganization if, as opinion polls predict, it wins power in the next election in 2010.
Under Tsalidis's plan, biology and organic chemistry institutes would transfer to a new facility that would be built at the elite Alexander Fleming Biomedical Research Centre outside Athens. Demokritos would absorb the NHRF's physics and remaining chemistry institutes, leaving the NHRF focused entirely on the humanities.
"It would be better to close institutes with poor evaluations rather than move them at great cost to a top-performing institute like the Fleming and dilute its efforts," says George Thireos, head of systems biology at the new Bioacademy research centre in Athens, which is run by the Academy of Athens and is not affected by the reorganization.
In 2006, Greece spent just 0.57% of its gross domestic product on research, one of the lowest percentages in the European Union, and there have been no competitive grants awarded for more than five years. "Changes to reduce duplication and promote collaboration are definitely needed here, but not in this way," says Effie Tsilibari, head of the Demokritos Institute of Biology, which faces relocation. "The proposal was rash, and it has left people paralysed."
But George Kollias, director of the Fleming Centre, says the bombshell should be seen as an opportunity to stop talking and finally take action. "We should act even on this plan, using it to open a real discussion on how things that need to be changed can be changed," he says.
Senior Bioacademy scientists issued a statement on 30 July saying that although changes are needed, plans should be formulated through thoughtful discussions aimed at obtaining maximum consensus — and, above all, there must be greater financial investment. "Any plan that emerges without serious commitment of state funds will be doomed to failure," they warn.
[naturenews]
Published online 4 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/460676a
News
Grant scores leave applicants in limbo
Top-rated research must wait until September for NIH funding decision.
Meredith Wadman
Applicants for the coveted Challenge Grants issued by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act learned the peer-review scores for their proposals late last month. Yet they received little in the way of certainty over whether those scores will translate into money come September, when the NIH will announce which grants it plans to fund.
Competition for the US$1-million, two-year awards is fierce — the agency in Bethesda, Maryland, received more than 21,000 applications, and the NIH director's office will fund only about 1% of these.
"I don't think I've ever been ambivalent about a second percentile score" that would normally be assured funding, says Joe Hogan, a biostatistician at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who hopes to use a Challenge Grant to study behavioural interventions for reducing alcohol abuse.
{“I don’t think I’ve ever been ambivalent about a second percentile score.”}
With ordinary grants, applicants can usually tell if their grant is fundable as soon they receive their percentile score because they already know the designated 'payline', or percentage of fundable applications. The NIH has designated an initial $200 million of $10.4 billion in economic stimulus funds for the grants, but with so many variables at play in allocating the stimulus money, predicting whether a given score will land funding is almost impossible — meaning that those with percentile scores in the mid-single digits are left hanging.
For example, Paul Janssen, a cardiac physiologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, scored a sixth percentile on his 'infrastructure' application, which, if funded, would build a system for obtaining and testing live tissue from healthy and failing human hearts. "I am cautiously optimistic," he says, only because the institute sponsoring the grant — the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute — is planning to go beyond the allocation from the director's office and fund 200 Challenge Grants in its topic areas. Some of the 27 institutes within the NIH are less enthusiastic about funding extra Challenge Grants and have chosen to use stimulus funds in other ways — for example, to boost existing investigator-initiated grants, or to sponsor standard grants that had fallen just short of the payline before the stimulus windfall arrived.
Meanwhile, the burden on the thousands of grant reviewers has, according to some, turned out to be bearable. Gary Johnson, chairman of the pharmacology department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told the NIH that he could review up to five Challenge Grant applications. "And they only gave me a couple," he says. "I don't know anyone who was overwhelmed by reviewing, because there was an overwhelming agreement of investigators to participate in the process."
[naturenews]
Published online 4 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/460671a
News
Greek scientists fight research shake-up
Protests greet plans to dismantle multidisciplinary institutions.
Alison Abbott
Instead of enjoying a tranquil summer break, Greek researchers are fighting a major reorganization that will carve up two of the country's largest research centres.
Filippos Tsalidis, head of the development ministry's office for research and technology, took the scientific community by surprise by announcing the changes, intended to promote efficiency, in the business newspaper Naftemporiki on 3 June.
He plans to reshape research institutes overseen by his ministry, turning some into single-discipline centres and uniting smaller institutes in the south and north of the country into two regional centres.
Two major multidisciplinary research centres in Athens — the National Centre for Scientific Research Demokritos and the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF) — will be partly dismantled. In 2001 and 2005, panels of international experts commissioned by the Greek government judged research at these centres to be poor, although improving in parts.
Greek scientists, angry at not being consulted about the restructuring, say it will cost more than it saves, is at odds with current multidisciplinary scientific trends, and will not solve the problem of underperforming research units. The plans have sparked public demonstrations, petitions and newspaper campaigns.
The opposition socialist party has pledged to reverse the reorganization if, as opinion polls predict, it wins power in the next election in 2010.
Under Tsalidis's plan, biology and organic chemistry institutes would transfer to a new facility that would be built at the elite Alexander Fleming Biomedical Research Centre outside Athens. Demokritos would absorb the NHRF's physics and remaining chemistry institutes, leaving the NHRF focused entirely on the humanities.
"It would be better to close institutes with poor evaluations rather than move them at great cost to a top-performing institute like the Fleming and dilute its efforts," says George Thireos, head of systems biology at the new Bioacademy research centre in Athens, which is run by the Academy of Athens and is not affected by the reorganization.
In 2006, Greece spent just 0.57% of its gross domestic product on research, one of the lowest percentages in the European Union, and there have been no competitive grants awarded for more than five years. "Changes to reduce duplication and promote collaboration are definitely needed here, but not in this way," says Effie Tsilibari, head of the Demokritos Institute of Biology, which faces relocation. "The proposal was rash, and it has left people paralysed."
But George Kollias, director of the Fleming Centre, says the bombshell should be seen as an opportunity to stop talking and finally take action. "We should act even on this plan, using it to open a real discussion on how things that need to be changed can be changed," he says.
Senior Bioacademy scientists issued a statement on 30 July saying that although changes are needed, plans should be formulated through thoughtful discussions aimed at obtaining maximum consensus — and, above all, there must be greater financial investment. "Any plan that emerges without serious commitment of state funds will be doomed to failure," they warn.
[naturenews]
Published online 4 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/460676a
News
Grant scores leave applicants in limbo
Top-rated research must wait until September for NIH funding decision.
Meredith Wadman
Applicants for the coveted Challenge Grants issued by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act learned the peer-review scores for their proposals late last month. Yet they received little in the way of certainty over whether those scores will translate into money come September, when the NIH will announce which grants it plans to fund.
Competition for the US$1-million, two-year awards is fierce — the agency in Bethesda, Maryland, received more than 21,000 applications, and the NIH director's office will fund only about 1% of these.
"I don't think I've ever been ambivalent about a second percentile score" that would normally be assured funding, says Joe Hogan, a biostatistician at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who hopes to use a Challenge Grant to study behavioural interventions for reducing alcohol abuse.
{“I don’t think I’ve ever been ambivalent about a second percentile score.”}
With ordinary grants, applicants can usually tell if their grant is fundable as soon they receive their percentile score because they already know the designated 'payline', or percentage of fundable applications. The NIH has designated an initial $200 million of $10.4 billion in economic stimulus funds for the grants, but with so many variables at play in allocating the stimulus money, predicting whether a given score will land funding is almost impossible — meaning that those with percentile scores in the mid-single digits are left hanging.
For example, Paul Janssen, a cardiac physiologist at Ohio State University in Columbus, scored a sixth percentile on his 'infrastructure' application, which, if funded, would build a system for obtaining and testing live tissue from healthy and failing human hearts. "I am cautiously optimistic," he says, only because the institute sponsoring the grant — the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute — is planning to go beyond the allocation from the director's office and fund 200 Challenge Grants in its topic areas. Some of the 27 institutes within the NIH are less enthusiastic about funding extra Challenge Grants and have chosen to use stimulus funds in other ways — for example, to boost existing investigator-initiated grants, or to sponsor standard grants that had fallen just short of the payline before the stimulus windfall arrived.
Meanwhile, the burden on the thousands of grant reviewers has, according to some, turned out to be bearable. Gary Johnson, chairman of the pharmacology department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told the NIH that he could review up to five Challenge Grant applications. "And they only gave me a couple," he says. "I don't know anyone who was overwhelmed by reviewing, because there was an overwhelming agreement of investigators to participate in the process."
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