SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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".)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves