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U.S. National Institutes of Health Punishes Researchers Who Break Confidentiality of Peer Review

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

takyon writes:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 01 2018, @04:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 01 2018, @04:15PM (#661179)

    We used the blog as an opportunity to remind all of us how important it is that we all do our utmost to assure the integrity of peer review. Failure to do so, we wrote, will “result in needless expenditure of government funds and resources, and erode the public trust in science.”

    Is there any evidence that this institutionalized peer review is impeding the "needless expenditure of government funds"? To me, its primary role seems to be as a wholly inadequate substitute for actually funding/running the needed replication studies.*

    *Besides this, they have also replaced checking the predictions of a theory with checking the predictions of a null hypothesis.