New paper out in PNAS! We show that becoming a grandparent substantially reduces employment and earnings, especially for women. At the same time, grandparents go more to the doctor for respiratory infections, but less for mental health conditions. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
8/ A credit system could also create useful signals.
If researchers are willing to spend scarce application credits on a call, that tells funders something about where the research community sees opportunity and value.
10/ Credits could be earmarked for early-career researchers.
They could also be awarded for reviewing and serving on grant panels.
12/ But unlimited application volume is not neutral.
It is a choice to tolerate the waste of valuable scientific time and congestion of the research funding system.
Application credits could help allocate scarce applicant and reviewer time, allowing scientists to focus on science.
7/ This would make an implicit constraint explicit.
There is a finite amount of time available to applicants, administrators, reviewers, and funders.
At present, we pretend there is not. Then everyone acts surprised when the system clogs up.
11/ There are obvious risks: gaming, institutional hoarding, effects on early-career researchers, and changes in the types of research that get submitted and funded.
These would need piloting and evaluation.
9/ Researchers could also pay credit deposits for specific calls.
That could give real-time pre-submission information about likely proposal numbers and success rates, before everyone spends weeks writing applications.
6/ Unused credits could be shared or traded.
That would allow submission opportunities to move around the system, rather than being fixed by crude per-person or per-institution quotas.
5/ We suggest one possible approach: tradable application credits.
Funders could issue credits calibrated to a target success rate.
Researchers or institutions would need credits to submit applications.
4/ Interviews, shorter forms, portfolio assessment, and AI-assisted triage may all help.
But they do not solve the underlying imbalance between the number of proposals submitted and the funding available.