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posted by mrpg on Saturday March 31 2018, @07:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the hush dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday April 01 2018, @08:29AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday April 01 2018, @08:29AM (#661081) Homepage
    And surely this is better out in the open? Light cleanses.

    (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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