How Do You Want Your Research Funded?
By only rewarding "safe" research, the biggest funders aren't enabling truly groundbreaking discoveries anymore. Here's where the system breaks down and how scientists are trying to change it.
It doesn’t take much to find the problems revolving around research funding today. From extreme bureaucracy and paperwork to the intense competition across fields, getting reliable funding for research isn’t easy.
Fortunately, this hasn't always been the case, and in the last decade serious strides have been made to address these issues. By taking lessons from the past, and promoting new priorities for the future, metascientists and the scientific community are rethinking the structures and drivers of how research is funded.
In this issue of The Scoop we’ll dive into the key issues with research funding and publishing today, and what exciting solutions are already addressing it. Our recent interview with Stuart Buck, who’s participated in the evolution of metascience over the last decade and now directs the Good Science Project, sheds much-needed light on the prevailing issues and solutions when it comes to improving the situation.
What’s wrong with research funding today
It’s not just how research is funded or what research is funded. When we start lifting the cover on the world of research funding, we quickly see a myriad of interconnected issues: existing challenges, unseen biases, underfunding replication research that ensures quality, and the reduction in high-risk, high-reward work. Here are the key problems in research funding and what that means for the rest of science.
Bureaucracy
Most researchers are aware of the role government plays in funding research. Today, about half of all research at U.S. universities is funded by the federal government. Other countries also have a significant portion of research funded by the government (31% in Australia in 2018, 68% of all public R&D in France in 2014, 30% of all R&D in Germany).
This central approach to funding results in a couple key issues. One is basic bureaucracy. Researchers often spend more time dealing with paperwork than actually getting research done. To get a window into this world, consider that the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) guide for “preparing and submitting applications” is 157 pages long. Ironically, even attempts to reduce paperwork end up having an inverse effect. Burdensome bureaucracy is a barrier to quickly funding and supporting high-impact research. As we’ll discuss later, this is so hard to change that attempts to get around this turn instead to making entirely new, streamlined organizations (the ARPA-everything movement).
Lack of institutional diversity
Even if the bloated bureaucracy could be successfully addressed, far bigger issues remain. Most funding is in the hands of just a few organizations, so that there’s little opportunity to introduce a radical diversity of perspectives when it comes to what kind of research is funded. This, as Buck and those in The Good Science Project say, constitutes a lack of institutional diversity. Not only may it limit the kinds of approaches pursued in a field, it also inhibits novel, high-risk and experimental research.
Bias towards “safe” research
Many remarkable discoveries and critical research breakthroughs of the past would never have happened in today’s funding climate. Today, researchers must first prove their research before even getting funding. A strong emphasis on preliminary data and findings doesn’t make room for truly novel and unexpected findings. It’s difficult to address proposals based on their “transformative” potential, since genuinely novel discoveries aren’t guaranteed or obvious. As Nobel winner Roger Kornberg puts it, “discoveries are by their nature unanticipated, completely unknown.”
It’s not only transformative research that’s compromised in the current funding paradigm. Lack of replication and reproducibility in research is still a hot topic, and tightly connected to funding as well. In the same way that high-risk research isn’t easy to sell, replication work isn’t rewarded well in the current system. However, the replication crisis has received widespread attention in recent years and many general and domain-specific organizations have cropped up to address it.
How funding is changing, for the better
Over the last decade, many organizations have cropped up to address the quality of scientific research. One such initiative is the Good Science Project, lead by Stuart Buck, which focuses on raising public awareness of funding and publishing issues, as well as promoting better values for future research. The organization promotes a set of guiding principles for what a good funding system entails, and allows researchers to be added as signatories.
Equally important to communicating with researchers at large, the Good Science Project also serves to inform research organizations and entities on how to make good, sustainable changes in funding.
Creating institutional diversity and innovation
Increasing the diversity of research projects enables truly innovative, high-risk work to get funded. It also limits the biases of any one prevalent research funder from influencing the future of research in that field. Several huge philanthropies and government agencies tend to dominate the research funding landscape. For example, of the $USD686 million invested into cancer research in Canada between 2016-2020, $338 million (about half) was awarded by a single entity, the Canadian Institute for Health Research. For biomedical researchers in the U.S., about 50% of research is funded by the NIH. This means that any particular preferences, biases or research priorities of these institutions strongly influences the present and future work of the field.
There are many ideas for reshaping institutional diversity, trying to mix up who makes the decisions, who is eligible, and ultimately, what gets funded. Organizations can try “re-granting” programs, by asking a third-party institution to take a portion of funding and decide its fate. The advantage would be that if these “re-granted” funds end up funding highly successful projects, the original institution can use that information to identify better selection methods for the future and identify gaps in their own selection criteria.
Another idea may be to even experiment with introducing elements of randomness, like lottery systems. Experimenting with a lottery-system, for all applicants that meet a certain threshold of requirements, leaves some decision-making to chance. It may enable unexpected breakthroughs, where otherwise unintentionally biased decision-making would continuously reward the same types of applicants.
Even the structures of organizations play a role. Since most academic institutions are structured similarly, this may have systematic effects which hinder a diversity of decision-making. The Good Science promotes smart restructuring, by reviewing how entities like the NIH are set-up and what direction to take with reform.
It’s ideas like these that Buck and his colleagues explore, write about and share with organizations.
New funding is already here
Although these ideas sound theoretical, new funding options are already emerging. The NIH runs the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, which funds higher-risk research that wouldn’t be competitive in traditional peer-review. Canada created the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) a few of years ago, which also focuses on high-risk research. Last year, the NSF committed to experimenting with how it funds research.
For some time, the U.S. has also been creating a slew of research agencies based off of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been enabling successful research since the 1960s. Even the UK set up its ARPA-inspired Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) in 2022. This “ARPA-everything” movement has lead to ARPA-Health in the U.S., which is already funding innovative projects with aggressive timelines, like the living knee replacement project at Columbia.
These changes constitute exciting transformations in the existing funding paradigm, but some solutions bypass the system altogether. Decentralized science is an emerging movement, attempting to transform research funding by relying on blockchain technologies. It exists largely through independent decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) which focus on specific scientific fields. One of the newest DAOs is Hélice, which aims to accelerate research and decrease prices of bionic prosthetics and artificial organs. DAOs like this one, and the more centralized ResearchHub platform, turn towards alternative funding methods like crowdsourcing and quadratic funding.
There are many opportunities for improvement when it comes to research funding, but the most essential change is simply trying. Funding bodies need to experiment in order to find out what works. This is one of the core missions of The Good Science project, and essential to transforming the funding system. Organizations simply need to experiment and actually put their ideas to the test. As Stuart Buck puts it, “The idea of trying new ideas. That, to me, is the most important thing to get right.”
Do you battle with these issues in funding research? How would you want research to be funded? Tell us in the comments below and join the conversation!
The Scoop would like to thank Stuart Buck for his unique perspectives and valuable contributions to this edition of The Scoop. Learn more about his work and follow his writing at The Good Science Project Substack.
Resources
The Good Science Project Substack
Do We Fund New Research or Not?, March 2024
Three thoughts on "high-risk" research, March 2024
Metascience Since 2012: A Personal History, 2023
How ARPA-H can master the subtle art of risk-taking, 2023
The Paperwork Reduction Act Is Terrible, and We Should Eliminate or Reform It, 2023
Pioneering the Future: Top 6 Upcoming Decentralized Science Tokens Transforming Industries, 2023
Is Decentralised Science better science?, 2023
The Reproducibility Crisis Isn't New, But This Way of Fixing It Is, 2023
The rise of ‘ARPA-everything’ and what it means for science, 2021