5 ms·

> Maybe we could call this "depository" of money to conduct research something like, hmmm, what's a good word… a grant? Nah, that word is already in use for st

by apathy 10y ago

> Maybe we could call this "depository" of money to conduct research something like, hmmm, what's a good word… a grant? Nah, that word is already in use for stagnant allocations of academic welfare to work on bullshit instead of transformative techniques (e.g. CAR T-cells, which NIH refused to fund for years). Need a new word to signify "money that is actually intended to produce results" instead of "a pension for irrelevant tenured senior PIs to pay non-English-speakers below-minimum-wage to work on topics that became irrelevant a decade ago". > Maybe they could call it something like… amount of impact or maybe just impact factor for short. I think this could work really well. Ah yes, impact factor is such an amazing tool. It allows "executive" "leadership" types to predict (very poorly, but who cares?) how many citations a paper might receive if it survives the months or years between submission and publication in a major journal. Trouble is, JIF is massively massaged and the COI that Thompson Reuters has in equitably enforcing it is ridiculous. WARNING: Non-peer-reviewed work ahead! If you're not careful, you might have to apply critical thinking to it! http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/05/062109 http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/05/062109 > Maybe a general fund should be created to support science! That's a great theory. Perhaps it can be as well executed as the CIHR fund (where study section has given way to "ignore everyone who doesn't suck my dick directly") or NSF (whose yearly funding is dwarfed by the R&D funding at a single company). This approach is working out very well! You know, if I didn't know better, I might think you were the sort of researcher that fails to look at the details and just submits your most fashionable bullshit to whateve journal at which your pals happen to be editors. I might get the impression that you're the cancer which is killing grant-funded science, which prizes large labs over large numbers of R01 projects, which believes that O&A is an entitlement to take out mortgages on new buildings instead of to pay for the costs of disbursing and administering a grant. But, since the evidence isn't before me, I won't. It would be nice if you thought a little more carefully about what you wrote. The devil is in the details.

kd0amg 10y ago
> or NSF (whose yearly funding is dwarfed by the R&D funding at a single company) If the worst thing you can say about the NSF is that they need more money, that makes it sound like GP has come up with a nice way to allocate the available funding towards particular research projects. > It would be nice if you thought a little more carefully about what you wrote. The devil is in the details. Details like how to get "crowdfunding" to put up enough money that "independent scientist" can be a full time job and not just a hobby for the odd few who somehow already have most of the needed lab facilities/equipment?
- apathy 10y ago
  I take it you're not familiar with "crowdfunding" sources like the AACR, LLS, ASCO, or other professional societies? As someone who is funded by several of the above, and who noted that their review processes were substantially less bullshit-intensive yet no less rigorous than NIH review (which has many benefits, efficiency not among them), I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that it's possible. As far as the NSF, they do a good job with what they have, but what they have is not commensurate with what we as a society could stand to spent on science. Even NCI is a far cry from that: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmLJzKQWkAAl372.jpg:small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmLJzKQWkAAl372.jpg:small Distributions are similar for various other avenues of funding, and it is quite clear that the overhead & administrative costs requested by many recipient instutions are far out of proportion to actual needs, so the impact of the funding allocations is further reduced. Thus it appears that a direct conduit from potential patrons to researchers is, in fact, desirable. Otherwise, services like experiment.com would not exist. They're not at the level of an NIH study section (duh?) but they have consistently produced a small stream of usable results that belie their supposed irrelevance. Once upon a time, the Royal Society existed for just such matchmaking: find a rich patron and a promising young scientist and line them up. You've likely noticed that many if not most major universities and "centers of excellence" rely upon exactly this model, supplemented with NIH or NSF grants, to exist. Further modularizing the model so that an administrative hand yanking out bloated "indirects" at every turn is not mandated might not be the worst thing, or (alternatively) being more transparent with said O&A requests, might at least bring some of the bullshit under control. The public clearly wants accountability. The masses may be asses, but if we want their money, we really ought to be transparent about what we're doing with it.
  - beevai142 10y ago
    The difference between professional societies and crowdfunding is that professionals, not the crowd who donate directly, decides which projects to fund. In this sense, I do not see a great qualitative different to government funding agencies --- if you do, please elaborate. EDIT: And to clarify, in the societies I know, general members do not directly take part in grant decision processes. Rather, the decisions are made by a small panel, possibly together with external reviewers. This is fairly different from crowdsourcing.
yayday 10y ago
I wasn't saying the current system is great, there's a lot wrong with it yes I agree. The impact factor thing is also a pretty silly metric to me as well, I agree with you there. The point I was trying to make, albeit sarcastically, was that the system the guy proposed is what we have today just without the extra hoops to jump through. Like I have absolutely no interest in maintaining a Bitcoin wallet or whatever nor do I want anything to do with them. I'll take my funding in dollars or euros or something real and tangible please.
- apathy 10y ago
  Mostly agreed, although I did consider using an HPC allocation to mine bitcoins & hire work study students. But then it turned out that if you study interesting stuff and write the ad correctly, you'll have to beat them away with a stick. For good measure, I convinced one of our corporate patrons that they ought to pay for one of the students. As far as extra hoops, it's not clear to me whether endless NIH paperwork bloat and ICMJE declarations are more or less onerous than crowdsourcing type stuff. I tend to think there must be a happy medium, but I could just be naive.

by apathy 10y ago

kd0amg 10y ago

> or NSF (whose yearly funding is dwarfed by the R&D funding at a single company) If the worst thing you can say about the NSF is that they need more money, that makes it sound like GP has come up with a nice way to allocate the available funding towards particular research projects. > It would be nice if you thought a little more carefully about what you wrote. The devil is in the details. Details like how to get "crowdfunding" to put up enough money that "independent scientist" can be a full time job and not just a hobby for the odd few who somehow already have most of the needed lab facilities/equipment?

apathy 10y ago
I take it you're not familiar with "crowdfunding" sources like the AACR, LLS, ASCO, or other professional societies? As someone who is funded by several of the above, and who noted that their review processes were substantially less bullshit-intensive yet no less rigorous than NIH review (which has many benefits, efficiency not among them), I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that it's possible. As far as the NSF, they do a good job with what they have, but what they have is not commensurate with what we as a society could stand to spent on science. Even NCI is a far cry from that: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmLJzKQWkAAl372.jpg:small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmLJzKQWkAAl372.jpg:small Distributions are similar for various other avenues of funding, and it is quite clear that the overhead & administrative costs requested by many recipient instutions are far out of proportion to actual needs, so the impact of the funding allocations is further reduced. Thus it appears that a direct conduit from potential patrons to researchers is, in fact, desirable. Otherwise, services like experiment.com would not exist. They're not at the level of an NIH study section (duh?) but they have consistently produced a small stream of usable results that belie their supposed irrelevance. Once upon a time, the Royal Society existed for just such matchmaking: find a rich patron and a promising young scientist and line them up. You've likely noticed that many if not most major universities and "centers of excellence" rely upon exactly this model, supplemented with NIH or NSF grants, to exist. Further modularizing the model so that an administrative hand yanking out bloated "indirects" at every turn is not mandated might not be the worst thing, or (alternatively) being more transparent with said O&A requests, might at least bring some of the bullshit under control. The public clearly wants accountability. The masses may be asses, but if we want their money, we really ought to be transparent about what we're doing with it.
- beevai142 10y ago
  The difference between professional societies and crowdfunding is that professionals, not the crowd who donate directly, decides which projects to fund. In this sense, I do not see a great qualitative different to government funding agencies --- if you do, please elaborate. EDIT: And to clarify, in the societies I know, general members do not directly take part in grant decision processes. Rather, the decisions are made by a small panel, possibly together with external reviewers. This is fairly different from crowdsourcing.

yayday 10y ago

I wasn't saying the current system is great, there's a lot wrong with it yes I agree. The impact factor thing is also a pretty silly metric to me as well, I agree with you there. The point I was trying to make, albeit sarcastically, was that the system the guy proposed is what we have today just without the extra hoops to jump through. Like I have absolutely no interest in maintaining a Bitcoin wallet or whatever nor do I want anything to do with them. I'll take my funding in dollars or euros or something real and tangible please.

apathy 10y ago
Mostly agreed, although I did consider using an HPC allocation to mine bitcoins & hire work study students. But then it turned out that if you study interesting stuff and write the ad correctly, you'll have to beat them away with a stick. For good measure, I convinced one of our corporate patrons that they ought to pay for one of the students. As far as extra hoops, it's not clear to me whether endless NIH paperwork bloat and ICMJE declarations are more or less onerous than crowdsourcing type stuff. I tend to think there must be a happy medium, but I could just be naive.