Grant-writing question - isn’t it weird / stressful to put all your ideas out there, for a 10% chance to be funded, while at the same time taking the risk that other researchers (intentionally or not) might use these ideas for their own benefit?
(Of course this wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t all competing with each other.. but we currently are) #Academia#Research#Science#Grants
@elduvelle Understandable concern! A few positive points, admittedly from NIH review perspective:
NIH study sections need to cover a wide range of expertise. Few on the panel work directly on the same topic as you. That greatly reduces the people who might run with your idea.
Reviewers see you have fleshed out the methodology and setup and that you already have pilot data. They know you are way ahead!
I would guess it is super uncommon for someone to feel they want to steal an idea.
@elduvelle IME if all you've got are ideas you're unlikely to get funded -- generally you need pretty strong preliminary data to demonstrate feasibility so any competitive grant application has ideas that are well on the way to being published. At that point if other researchers use the idea for their own benefit you win, right? Plenty of exceptions but those tend to be easier to de-identify e.g. "fly line 1" or "gene z."
@schoppik I see (I knew that some grant schemes give some importance to preliminary data, but it looks more widespread and more important than what I thought)!
So with this in mind it seems optimal to use projects that are almost already finished for your grant applications, and use the money to work on the next project? That seems a bit fishy but I know some people do it…🤔
@elduvelle yeah as long as "feasibility" is a scored criteria, then there's no way around the evidence that preliminary data brings. It's worth keeping in mind that a typical NIH grant isn't a contract. It's built to permit the flexibility that comes with discovery that follows experiments. So the whole "use completed projects for the grants, and use the money to work on the next project" simply follows -- nothing "fishy" about it.
@elduvelle At least for NIH grants, the idea has to be grounded in extensive preliminary data, so ideally you are far along towards bringing a novel idea to fruition before submitting an application. So if an unethical reviewer decided to try to use your application to advance their own work (explicitly forbidden by guidelines for grant reviewers) you'd have quite a head start already. (In my case, working with primates helps a lot because the investment to get anything going is so great it's unlikely I'm going to get scooped)
My experience with UK funding agencies is not recent but there it seemed like the idea and the overall conceptual framework had a lot more bearing on the process, so perhaps there is an argument there for being a little more conservative until you have a major paper in the pipeline.
@markgbaxter@elduvelle
Speaking as a member of the clock/Drosophila research community: the funding is so tight at the moment, we tend to diversify a lot to avoid competition with our own kinds and then we are also a very trusty crowd so we actually send our proposal to peer critique! by our network. Not a formal process but 'like-minded' teams eventually sort out among them to either collab or diverse. We tend to become more scared when the USA competition is possible!
@elduvelle
As an experimentalist, I made peace a long time ago with the notion that ideas just aren’t the bottleneck. Why would anyone in their right mind do an experiment they know someone else was already doing!?
@NicoleCRust I know of several instances where this happened (someone doing what someone else was already doing, knowingly) 😕 (in experimental neuroscience)
Of course it probably also happens that two different labs start working on the same project independently… but how can you really know that it’s independent if the PIs all see each other’s grants during grant panels?
(Again, I really wish this wasn’t a problem and that instead, if you realized that team X was working on the same experiment at you, you could contact them and join forces. But in reality it’s going to be “let’s work faster to get this out before them”.)
@NicoleCRust Oh that’s not even the worst of it… there’s at least one lab I heard about where multiple postdocs are set to compete against each other on the same project… 😖
@elduvelle@NicoleCRust some do talk to each other, and they did join force but there is still problem: how many co first authors and who is the first first...it is rarely alphabetical 🙊. Like everyone above already said: it's more a process of letting it go than we actually can do something about avoid ideas get stolen...the worst some males are so forgetful they thought they come up with the idea themselves... You can always remove a list of reviewers you know are bad actors.
I agree. If we didn’t have the incentive structure to compete with each other, the possibility that ideas you come up with could be realized by someone else wouldn’t seem so painful. The fact that they even get realized at all would be a cause of celebration.
@tdverstynen So how do you cope with the dilemma? Avoid putting your “best” ideas in at the risk of not getting the grant exciting enough to be funded? Write grants on projects that are already finished? Or maybe just put it all there and hope for the best?
@elduvelle There is this concept in Taoism of letting go of owning your ideas in order to give them immortality. I really quite like this way of thinking about it.
@elduvelle Oh that kick hurts extra hard at an early career stage when there is so much at risk. I didn’t mean to minimize that. Just mentioning that this reframe was an effective coping mechanism for me.
@tdverstynen @elduvelle
The initial hope of preprinting on arXiv was to align these incentives better - share early to both claim precedence and get the ideas out faster so ppl pick up on it. It worked well for particle physics which had relatively few accelerators competing against each other, but one of the cool things about the prestige journal system is that its in part designed to allow you to strategically not cite prior work while making novelty claims.
Because youre right, it is absolutely absurd that its a bad thing for someone to have already done something and reached the same results as you - that should be a good thing!!!!
@jonny@tdverstynen you mean “cool” ironically right? Because I hate that aspect of the fancy journals when you are pushed to forget the past literature to make your own work look more novel. I wish the reviewers were more vigilant about that.
This comment made me think about that recent PNAS paper where a bunch of economists somehow rediscovered that surveys can reliably measure peoples attitudes and values.
Everybody ridiculed it and yet it still got a bunch of citations and attention anyway. Win-win for the journal.
@tdverstynen @elduvelle
Exactly. Pinning the responsibility on reviewers is a purposefully losing game. 3 people being the sole deciders whether something becomes Verified Fact is absurd in principle, and practically reviewers cant know everything and have a raft of incentives to let sloppy work by. The problem is the infrastructure and organization of journal led review itself - it should be possible to contextualize and evaluate a work continuously. When something doesnt make a link between itself and another work, it should be possible to make that link ourselves. Not just as a platform overlay, but in the same medium that the original work exists in.
This is one of the many interlocking ways that limiting our imagination to journals as we know them guarantees that we will continue to get journals as we know them. (Not directing this as criticism towards either of yall, just that this is usually the way things cycle around)
@tdverstynen @elduvelle
We talk about work all day long but it is impossible to represent any of that talk on the work itself and that is ridiculous. Journal publication is strictly anachronistic to how everyone everywhere interacts with information.
@tdverstynen @elduvelle
Whats very funny is how high prestige researchers react to the suggestion of continuous contextualization is that they publish so much important work that they could never be expected to respond to criticism forever even though a) thats not the idea and b) work that claims to be very important is exactly the work that should be scrutinized most. So they're very comfy with the 3 person review thanks.
@tdverstynen @elduvelle
And also the constant recourse to bad actors, where in a public communication system someone just constantly haranguing someone for their work would be part of their public reputation, whereas in the current system they can just idk be on the editorial board of a major journal and do that bullying behind closed doors.
I say thanks every time someone else commits to work on something I had thought of, something that likely was an idea whose time had come, so that I can focus on the rest. Often on whacky ideas, risky stuff that may fail upwards into other projects, projects that require a good amount of ignorance or otherwise others would be already working on them.
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