Research scientists will soon encounter similar pressures to entrepreneurs who negotiate the Medicare system. The scenario outlined in the article is similar to

Research scientists will soon encounter similar pressures to entrepreneurs who negotiate the Medicare system. The scenario outlined in the article is similar to many of the prosecutions for "Medicare fraud". Briefly, Medicare fraud is alleged whenever a business charges a lot to Medicare. This could be due to rapid growth or due to actual fraud, but it's immaterial. And often rapid growth happens due to exploitation of a previously unseen gray area (e.g. Facebook News Feed for Zynga) so regulators usually have an excuse to allege fraud. Unlike FB, they don't just block your API calls; the consequence of a new name appearing at the top of a "biggest earner list" is often a meteoric descent from a fast growing business into a federal prosecution. NIH is much nicer than other HHS agencies, as its primary duty is to hand out money rather than enforce regulations. But what happened here is similar. Someone ran analytics to try and figure out which scientists were getting the most money from NIH, and to put some blocks on that in a time of scarce funds. In this case, the issue is that scientists naturally want to avoid duplication of work, and some projects require more funding than the limits of one grant. So they package up the same papers for different agencies with a different spin (bio-terrorism for DoD and bio-remediation for DoE). That's natural and good: leverage your existing work to get more money for the same amount of input. Put another way, this is like selling the same product (your research output) in multiple distribution channels. However, problems arise with third party payment. I don't mind that you got a "duplicate" can of Coca Cola, or that the Coke company amortized labor across two different cans. But the government is ostensibly paying on behalf of the public for this work, and its incentives are more to keep scientists employed and to appear egalitarian than to maximize scientific productivity per se. It also wants to award less in grants while seeming "fair". In any case, while nothing criminal/civil is being alleged now, I anticipate that grant agencies will make use of software that checks for duplicates in a way to reduce the outflow of money and make it harder for scientists to leverage the same work in multiple channels. The only silver lining here is that some scientists may start to explore non-governmental channels for funding, like patrons in the technology sector, or Kickstarters, or MOOCs, or other vehicles. Another response will be predator/prey like evasions by scientists, to set up grant collaboratives of K people in which the senior author is changed for each application. This will mean no individual scientist appears at the top of a list of "biggest earners", and is not targeted for duplication-based denials.