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: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 01 2018, @12:55PM
Broken analogy. These review boards are a system intended to evaluate the quality of proposed research and help select and fund the research that is best, according to the criteria of the NIH at the time. So the whole point of them is to yield better research in the first place. Is are guns a system which tries to reduce shootings? Of course not.