Flipping the grant application review process

The return on research investment resulting from new breakthrough scientific discoveries may be decreasing over time due to the law of diminishing returns, the relative decrease of research funding in terms of purchasing power parity, and various activities gaming the system. By altering the grant-review process, the scientific community may directly address the third problem. There is evidence that peer reviews of research proposals may lack reliability and may produce invalid or inconsistent ratings. In addition, extreme focus on grantsmanship threatens to uproot a cornerstone principle that scientific-value should be the key driver in funding decision-making. This opinion provides (1) a justification of the need to consider alternative strategies to boost the impact of public investment in innovative scientific discovery, (2) proposes a framework for flipping the traditional front-loaded peer-review approach to allocation of research funding, into a new back-loaded assessment of scholarly return on investment, and (3) provokes the scientific community to accelerate the debate on alternative funding mechanisms, as the stakes of inaction may be very high.