Background: Pilot project programs offer early-stage and other investigators support to pursue emerging research areas, explore new methodologies, gain experience as principal investigators, and collect pilot data needed to pursue larger extramural research funding, such as from the National Institutes of Health. Pilot project programs may be…

Bibliometric benchmarking can be an aid to researchers pondering whether to apply for competitive grants. In this paper, the highly prestigious grants offered by the European Research Council to young scientists of any nationality were scrutinized. The analysis of the 2014-2015 data indicates that over 75% of life science grantees in the starting…

Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is…

Far from allowing a governance of universities by the invisible hand of market forces, research performance assessments do not just measure differences in research quality, but yield themselves visible symptoms in terms of a stratification and standardization of disciplines. The article illustrates this with a case study of UK history departments…

In 2004, all national universities in Japan, which had previously been legally subordinate to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), became separate National University Corporations. With this change, the importance of securing competitive funding increased significantly, and university researchers have had to…

James M. Fadool, an associate professor of biology at Florida State University, got a federal grant of more than $300,000 to study eye defects using zebra-fish. Some of that money went to pay another researcher, $1,536 biweekly, to assist with the research and manage the lab where the fish were kept. But an audit by the Office of Inspector General…

Ethical, Legal and Social Implications ("ELSI") research has played an increasingly important role in scientific research. Tens of millions of dollars, many of which are public, are spent funding scientific research projects. Taxpayers are demanding that scientific advancement move forward, hand-in-hand with careful examination of the many ethical…

Issues in determination of overhead for cost recovery from research funding sources are discussed, including the need to collect overhead, principles involved in charging for overhead, range of activity types to be considered, classification and calculation of costs, pricing policy, and payment to the university versus payment to its components.…

Results of a survey of 447 universities concerning the use of fixed-price contracts for research are presented, and guidelines for the use of such contracts are suggested. (MSE)

As Congress prepares for the next cycle of appropriations, lawmakers and academics must consider what military research projects are doing to the universities and decide where the lines on academic freedom should be drawn, both by the government and by the universities themselves. (MSE)

A discussion of the National Institutes of Health grants peer review system suggests that, while the system is the most effective for assuring support for high-quality medical and nursing research, serious erosion in confidence in the system has occurred and must be resolved within the biomedical research community. (MSE)

Businesses and universities must be encouraged to act from their traditional positions of strength, based on the longest view and the broadest interests. They must examine carefully their potential sources of conflict as well as opportunities for benefit before engaging in alliances that may become complex and difficult to manage. (MSE)

In the largest settlement of its kind, New York University has agreed to pay the federal government $15.5 million to resolve charges that it submitted false information to obtain inflated reimbursements for costs associated with research grants. At least four universities are being investigated on similar grounds. The Clinton Administration issued…

College faculty applying for the National Endowment for the Humanities' Summer Stipend Program for independent study and research are usually nominated by their institutions. Nomination procedures used by institutions that consistently nominate successful applicants are described, and the research administrator's role in the process is discussed.…

This brief guide to the Research Programs Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities covers basic information, describes programs, and summarizes policies and procedures. An introductory section describes the division and its mission to encourage the development and dissemination of significant knowledge and scholarship in the…