Peer review under fire.
Charles comments in maroon
John C. Polanyi, a professor of chemistry at the University of Toronto, sharply criticizes the way peer review is being conducted for the purposes of grant attribution (in Canada, I presume). He says that projects are being judged on external attributes, such as interdisciplinarity and networking, that do not guarantee excellence.
I must agree with Pr. Polanyi too. The way research grants are given in Canada supports research that will give result in the short/middle term. Nobody at the NRC seems to care about funding "first" steps toward a goal further in time than 3-5 years. When you work at laying the foundation of something new it can kill you if you don't produce "significant result" regularly. Those who worked in fundamental research know they can schedule discoveries or breakthrough to satisfy a panel of colleagues that will fund your research.
As much as I am into interdisciplinarity and networking, I agree with Polanyi that it is dangerous to explicitly require it, because it then becomes an end rather than a means. The same can be said of every word that gets turned into a buzzword as it is embraced and enforced by money-granting bodies.
But why, apart from the desire of governments to govern, should one want to apply these dubious criteria? It is because they are regarded as being objective. They constitute a form of accountability that can be quantified and appreciated by anyone. That is appealing. The drawback is that it is unreliable.
We would do better to explain that to the public. We must trust them to understand that performance in the arts, of which science is one, can only be judged by those skilled in the art.
Here I partially disagree. It is important to ensure that what you do is meaningful to people outside your clique. People who write obscure prose and only quote one another may be running around in circles, producing nothing of interest. If no one can come to the window, who will be able to tell?
True but results may take time to blossom. At the beginning the problem/issue being investigated may interest only a clique. But as we learn more, the scope of interest become wider and the science being "generated" movee from niche to mainstream. Researchers need time!
Instead of requiring objectively measurable attributes such as the presence of interdisciplinarity (the term itself having for all practical purposes lost all meaning, as everyone proceeds to claim it), why not ask grant applicants to spend a couple hours on the phone with a few taxpaying citizens? Choose people who are not skilled in the art, but are smart enough to understand, and ask scientists to explain what their project means to them.
And every year, pick a few scientists at random, and fund them, no questions asked. Just let them do their thing.
Great idea!
I strongly agree with Polanyi's last sentence though:
Fostering creativity has never been more important.
Further criticism of grant-giving procedures can be found in this article (PDF, 453k) in University Affairs.
(P.S. I lost my source for this link. If you blogged it, just leave a comment and I'll be happy to credit you.) [Seb's Open Research]
1:03:44 PM Google It!  - See Also: Science Trackback:
|
