Many novel funding approaches have been proposed in an attempt to free scientists from the endless grant-> public-> grant cycle. One is to accept only mini gra

Many novel funding approaches have been proposed in an attempt to free scientists from the endless grant-> public-> grant cycle. One is to accept only mini grant proposals, say 10 pages at most, and screen these to meet some minimum threshold, say, aiming for the top 20th percentile. Then a random subset of these get funded. This helps diversify the funding somewhat, and hopefully catch more "risky, but interesting" projects. Another approach has been universal funding. The most basic is "everyone gets X research dollars", and any additional funding would require submitting grants on top of that. More complex schemes propose "everyone gets 2X dollars, but they must donate X to other researchers", which allows some people to accumulate the funds necessary to conduct big, expensive work. But all of these proposals aim to minimize grant writing and review, and hopefully to diversify the kinds of work being done. Longer windows of evaluation could also be useful. Big interesting ideas take time to develop and support, but the competitive academic environment demands quick evaluations, which make ot difficult to sustain long projects. Evaluating a research project after 5 years, instead of 1 or 2, could help alleviate some of the pressure on researchers so they can pursue longer agendas. Every researcher can come up with their pet theory and solution. Ultimately, I think that all of these approaches, and many others, have merit. But we need to experiment with different policies to see what works.