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In a change that will cause mixed reactions, UK research funding proposals no longer need "impact" statements.
UK researchers will, however, benefit from no longer having to submit a "Pathways to Impact" plan or complete an "Impact Summary" when applying for cash from UKRI – the umbrella organization for the UK's seven research councils. The Pathways to Impact requirement, which had been in place for around a decade, was controversial. But for grant applications made from 1 March 2020, researchers will not have to submit. The UKRI currently invest a total of £7bn into British science each year
"The removal of 'Pathways to Impact' will be broadly welcomed by the many grant-writing physicists whose heart sank at the thought of churning out two pages of boilerplate on the ill-defined socioeconomic impact of their proposed research," says Physicist Philip Moriarty from the University of Nottingham. "Yet despite being a vocal opponent of it for many years, I feel it's important to recognise that it played a role in shifting attitudes regarding the broader implications of academic research. For one thing, the 'impact agenda' led to a greater – albeit, often rather opportunistic – interaction between science and the arts and humanities. Hopefully this interdisciplinary activity will continue in its absence".
The US National Science Foundation requires a "Broader Impacts" statement in its grant applications.
Grant proposals are generally a big time sink for scientists, and the "impact" statement seems like it needs the thickest helping of buzzwords, exaggerations, meaningless generalities, and unfounded optimism. But society legitimately wants to know what it's getting out of the research. Maybe cool results, publications, and productivity metrics are enough?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 01 2020, @05:53PM (5 children)
I agree that a well articulated impact is not an absolute requirement for "good" research, however, it would be useful to classify grant proposals into categories for their potential ROI.
In another life where I'm in charge of everything, I'd allocate a fixed percentage (somewhere in the 5-25% range) of grant funding for projects that simply cannot, or choose not to, imagine their impact on society, a similar percentage for projects which have concrete aims with well defined ROI expectations, that same percentage again to re-fund (the much smaller number of) teams which have successfully met or exceeded their projections in past projects, and the balance for the range in-between that have some fuzzy ideas about their benefits but can't practically put realistic bounds on them.
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(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday February 01 2020, @06:31PM (2 children)
I don't think anybody says that "impact" should not be a funding criterion. But someone more objective than the scientists themselves has to evaluate it. That's why we have funding managers. There is a fundamental conflict of interest when people (including scientists) describe the importance of their own work. Rather than pushing them to avoid this conflict of interest, society has been urging them to embrace it. If they are required to spend serious time talking up the importance of their work, they will less objective when asked to write reports and give policy advice.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 01 2020, @10:36PM
As specialized as we all have become, any research sufficiently advanced as to be worth funding is quite likely to be incomprehensible to those even a little bit outside the direct field....
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 01 2020, @11:02PM
Agreed. The current model for success in science requires HEAVY bullshit and HEAVY screwing over the workers. To be a success you need to stop doing the work and start writing the bullshit. Then bring in (Chinese of course*) graduate students who are on the hook to fulfill the... scratch that, who cares what they fulfill, just publish a lot and put my name on it. Then leverage high publication counts to get more money.
*Chinese are provided to American universities in exchange for them paying tuition fees and returning IP to the motherland.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday February 02 2020, @11:11AM (1 child)
Another thing to fix is streamlining the proposal process. As the OP points out, a ridiculous amount of time is wasted on writing grant proposals. What they don't point out is what this leads to, many, many grant proposal for ten to a hundred times what it really costs because just it's not worth writing a proposal for 40,000, so let's ask for 4M instead, spend 40,000 on the original research, and the remainder on stuff that's interesting but that we no longer have to faff around with grant proposals for.
This is why you get grant proposals for 2.5M for an earthshaking impactful study into the history of Ethiopian pottery in 4,000BC.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday February 02 2020, @02:45PM
IDK about your pottery analysts, but around here a skilled man-year costs our corporation about $200K, $400K if they're a consultant without benefits or continued employment expectations ($100K if they're an intern not expected to produce anything valuable in the majority if cases...)
Factor in the costs for field expeditions to Ethiopia, the government permitting process for excavation and exportation of culturally significant historical artifacts (they must be significant if there's a $2.5M grant to study them, eh?, I'd expect to tithe the authorities, at a minimum)... it sounds to me like your $2.5M grant is probably only going to fund 5 people for barely 2 years, one of those people to be full-time employed writing and processing the followup grant proposals.
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