Assuring the Integrity of Peer Review
Eight months ago, CSR Director Dr. Richard Nakamura and I posted a blog on “A Reminder of Your Roles as Applicants and Reviewers in Maintaining the Confidentiality of Peer Review.” We asked you to imagine a scenario: you are a reviewer for an upcoming panel meeting, and shortly before the meeting an investigator associated with an application communicates with you, asking for a favorable review in exchange for an academic favor. We asked what you would do – accept the offer, ignore it, or report it?
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 inte...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - December 22, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Mike Lauer Tags: blog Open Mike General Peer review Source Type: funding
The Importance of Timely Grant Closeout
At any given time, NIH staff are monitoring nearly 50,000 active grant awards. This monitoring happens throughout the grant life cycle, including once the award is over. Just as we strive to award meritorious grants as quickly as we can, it is equally important for us to ensure grant awards are taken off the books in a timely manner. A grant that slips past its closeout due date is costly and time consuming.
NIH has for years highlighted the impact of discrepancies between final financial reports for grant closeout and the importance of timely closeout. Ideally, we engage in a bilateral closeout with our awardees at the...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - December 21, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Mike Lauer Tags: blog Open Mike Award Programs Grants policy Source Type: funding
When a Country is Open, Do They Have Strong Science Too?
As no scientist is an island, the overall scientific enterprise grows stronger when people work together. But, an interesting question emerges from this concept for us to explore: how can we quantify the effect of collaboration on productivity and impact on science?
In the October 5 issue of Nature, Caroline Wagner, Ph.D. of the Ohio State University and Koen Jonker’s, Ph.D. of the European Commission Joint Research Center
published an interesting analysis of the association of a country’s “openness” and its scientific productivity. The authors assembled data from the Scopus database—a wealth of information on ci...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - December 11, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Mike Lauer Tags: blog Open Mike bibliometrics publications Source Type: funding
Be Careful to Pick the Right Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA)
Recent policy changes requiring clinical trial applications to be submitted to FOAs that specifically allow clinical trials, first announced in fall of 2016, impact how all NIH applicants choose a FOA, whether you are submitting a clinical trial or not.
Over the last year, each NIH Institute and Center has been carefully evaluating its research funding priorities and strategic goals and using that information to articulate their funding priorities for clinical trials. They are communicating their priorities through the funding opportunity announcements they issue.
The requirement to respond to clinical trial specific FOA...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - December 7, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Mike Lauer Tags: blog Open Mike applications Clinical Trials Source Type: funding
Why Project Outcomes Matter in your Interim and Final RPPR
The next time you are filling out your interim or final Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR) for your NIH grant, pay special attention to writing the project Outcomes section (Section I). That’s because any project outcomes submitted on or after Oct. 1, 2017 will be made available to the general public via NIH’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORTER).
You may wonder why the scientific community needs to report on outcomes and why we are making the outcomes available to the public. Reviewing reported outcomes is part of our stewardship of the public’s investment in research. Publicly posting grant ...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - November 16, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Mike Lauer Tags: blog Open Mike General RePORT Source Type: funding
