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NIH moves to punish researchers who violate confidentiality in proposal reviews
When a scientist sends a grant application to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, and it goes through peer review, the entire process is supposed to be shrouded in secrecy. But late last year, NIH officials disclosed that they had discovered that someone involved in the proposal review process had violated confidentiality rules designed to protect its integrity. As a result, the agency announced in December 2017 that it would rereview dozens of applications that might have been compromised.
Now, NIH says it has completed re-evaluating 60 applications and has also begun taking disciplinary action against researchers who broke its rules. "We are beginning a process of really coming down on reviewers and applicants who do anything to break confidentiality of review," Richard Nakamura, director of NIH's Center for Scientific Review (CSR), said at a meeting of the center's advisory council earlier this week. (CSR manages most of NIH's peer reviews.) Targets could include "applicants who try to influence reviewers ... [or] try to get favors from reviewers."
[...] The agency provided few details about the transgressions after Michael Lauer, NIH's deputy director for extramural research, published a blog post on the matter on 22 December 2017.
Related: Should Scientific Journals Publish Text of Peer Reviews?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday March 31 2018, @01:31PM (4 children)
You are correct, this isn't what is normally considered to be peer review. But it is still a form of peer review, just not the one we mostly think of or associate with the term.
It could be both a financial, a scientific and ethical dilemma. At this stage they are reviewing the proposal for the research to decide if they want to fund it or not. It might be a bit odd that a grants proposal should be secret, but there is a valid cases for it -- after all they don't have an infinite stack of grant money to hand out. If there are many different projects competing for the grants then a need for secrecy might be required. After all they want to get the most and best science for their grant money. So just like with public contracts if they can get just as good a science with as good a scientists for less bucks then from someone else they are going to go with that option. So if you have someone on the review board that can tell various project groups what the other applicants have put in their proposals and how much they are asking for they in turn can send in an application at the last moment and slide right under the others promising more and better science for less funds and so securing their own job for another couple of years. There is fierce competition for grants, so this isn't all that odd at all. Which in turn sort of makes this a big deal and it does matter.
Will it change the science? It could change science. In the sense that the other project might have another perspective or method or just by taking all the grant monies they prevent another project from doing their science.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nishi.b on Saturday March 31 2018, @03:26PM (3 children)
True.
But as a scientist I can tell you that in a lot f research projects it is almost impossible not to know who is the reviewer as there are a very limited number of people working in your specialized subfield. Just by the type of remarks, especially when are presenting a theory that conflicts with another one, if you get a review nitpicking about everything it comes from the other group, and as you meet them in scientific conference, you know who is going to express this or that concern. It can be even easier for grant applications to know that, because it is usually more high-profile professors that will be asked to fund you than ordinary journal papers.
So we answer to the reviewer's comments when that's part of the review process, we must answer as if we did not know who the reviewer is, which is often hypocritical...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rleigh on Saturday March 31 2018, @06:02PM (2 children)
My (software/methods) paper got rejected last year, not based upon its merits, but because the reviewers lab is a "competitor" of my supervisor (apparently, it's not like we work on exactly the same stuff). They didn't like one aspect of the design, which came down essentially to one opinion over another, neither of which is objectively correct, but just a pet preference. The journal rejected it because it was "controversial", ignoring the fact that the particular design feature was in widespread use for over 15 years. Seems very odd that a single individual can negatively impact the careers and success of other people by abusing the power they have been given. That's not "review", it's sabotage in my opinion, and it really sucks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by rleigh on Saturday March 31 2018, @06:08PM (1 child)
Hit submit too soon. I meant to add that if you see this stuff happening at the level of paper review, it almost certainly happens at the level of grant review as well. All the same set of people all sit on each others' grant review panels as well.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday April 01 2018, @08:29AM
(The last time I was any where near academia, the guy I was doing mathematical monkeywork for got rejected 5 times, but when his paper finally got accepted, the reviewer said something along the lines of "this rips the final pages out of all of the textbooks, and should be compulsory material when teaching the field". So I don't particularly trust peer review, even in a field as "opinion"-less as pure mathematics. OK, it worked in the end, but even then it was met with "but there's too much for one paper, can you split it".)
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