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

Accepted submission by takyon at 2018-03-30 17:20:37
Science

NIH moves to punish researchers who violate confidentiality in proposal reviews [sciencemag.org]

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 [nih.gov] on the matter on 22 December 2017.

Related: Should Scientific Journals Publish Text of Peer Reviews? [soylentnews.org]


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