Science stifled?
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Clive cookson and Andrew Jack
WHEN the US National Institutes of Health unveiled plans in the second week of this month to spend $l.0b over the next five years " "high-risk, high-impact transformative research", it marked the latest effort by academic founders and publishers alike to tackle growing concerns about a process at the core of scientific progress: peer review.
At least since the Syrian physician Ishaq bin Ali al-Rahwi described how a local medical council verified doctors' compliance with treatment standards more than a thousand years ago, peer review has played a role in science. It has become increasingly important in recent years as a means of rationing grants and publications in the face of a proliferation of academic research.
Peer review guards the gates at both ends of the research process - obtaining money to carry out a project and publishing the results in a journal. Specialists in the field, working individually or as panels, identify flaws and assess the importance of the work; the reviewers' identity is normally withheld from the author.
But the process is under assault from critics who say it is ineffective at filtering out poor research, while it perpetuates predictable work at the expense of more imaginative thinking. In the long run we all suffer, argues Don Braben of University College London, because economic growth depends on unpredictable scientific advances.
In response to the perceived constraints of the process, researchers are using the internet to open up new ways of publishing that streamline peer review -- or do away with it altogether -- while several of the world's biggest science funding bodies are making radical changes in the way they assess research proposals.
Recently, 25 distinguished scientists wrote to the Financial Times lamenting funding agencies' failure to back research "at the margins where unpredictable and transformative discoveries are made". They called for a global fund to support inspired scientists, free of peer review.
Then the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of sciences, said it was putting together a pilot scheme for a "blue skies" research fund, which would avoid the constraints of conventional peer review by using a generalist panel to consider proposals from any field, on the basis of their novelty and potential to open up new areas of science and technology.
This spring, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's richest charity, unveiled a $100m (euto64m,
WHEN the US National Institutes of Health unveiled plans in the second week of this month to spend $l.0b over the next five years " "high-risk, high-impact transformative research", it marked the latest effort by academic founders and publishers alike to tackle growing concerns about a process at the core of scientific progress: peer review.
At least since the Syrian physician Ishaq bin Ali al-Rahwi described how a local medical council verified doctors' compliance with treatment standards more than a thousand years ago, peer review has played a role in science. It has become increasingly important in recent years as a means of rationing grants and publications in the face of a proliferation of academic research.
Peer review guards the gates at both ends of the research process - obtaining money to carry out a project and publishing the results in a journal. Specialists in the field, working individually or as panels, identify flaws and assess the importance of the work; the reviewers' identity is normally withheld from the author.
But the process is under assault from critics who say it is ineffective at filtering out poor research, while it perpetuates predictable work at the expense of more imaginative thinking. In the long run we all suffer, argues Don Braben of University College London, because economic growth depends on unpredictable scientific advances.
In response to the perceived constraints of the process, researchers are using the internet to open up new ways of publishing that streamline peer review -- or do away with it altogether -- while several of the world's biggest science funding bodies are making radical changes in the way they assess research proposals.
Recently, 25 distinguished scientists wrote to the Financial Times lamenting funding agencies' failure to back research "at the margins where unpredictable and transformative discoveries are made". They called for a global fund to support inspired scientists, free of peer review.
Then the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of sciences, said it was putting together a pilot scheme for a "blue skies" research fund, which would avoid the constraints of conventional peer review by using a generalist panel to consider proposals from any field, on the basis of their novelty and potential to open up new areas of science and technology.
This spring, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's richest charity, unveiled a $100m (euto64m,