Funding Innovative Science

Britain pledges science funding boost

The British chancellor, Gordon Brown, last month set out spending plans that, if carried out, would lead to the largest sustained increase in science spending for a generation, but many researchers are concerned that such is the pressure on funds, there would be very little money left over for new research. Brown’s ten-year investment framework for science pledged that research and development ...

Science funding and science policy: Big data as a tool for supporting the research funding process

ÜberResearch pursues a comprehensive approach to big and small data to aid science funders in operations and analysis. We seek to consolidate global award data and funders’ internal data, with a focus on data harmonization, natural language processing and disambiguation. In this article, firstly, I give a definition and some examples of big data. Next, I look at the relevance of big data in sci...

Time to reform European science funding.

L aments about a " brain drain " of Europe's young scientists to the USA abounded at the recent Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2004 in Lisbon. By some reports, a third or more of the young scientists who pursue postdoc-toral training in the United States remain in North America, where they find it relatively easy to secure jobs and funding in a scientific market span...

Innovative Science and Technology Publications

Peer Review, Program Officers and Science Funding

Increased competition for research funding has led to growth in proposal submissions and lower funding-success rates. An agent-based model of the funding cycle, accounting for variations in program officer and reviewer behaviors, for a range of funding rates, is used to assess the efficiency of different proposal-submission strategies. Program officers who use more reviewers and require consens...