FundScience Collaborates with Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
08.11.09 by FundScience
FundScience and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center(PSC) have agreed to work together on the common goal of broadening research resources available to scientists and the public. PSC provides university, government, and industrial researchers with access to high-performance computing (HPC), communications and data-handling technologies. As a result of the partnership with PSC, applicants eligible for the grants funded and facilitated by FundScience will have an option to qualify for access to PSC’s HPC resources. PSC will also provide computing resources for FundScience .
The FundScience grant application, which will be soon posted on the FundScience website, will include information required to receive a PSC starter grant. The donation is subject to the applicant qualifying for a FundScience grant and subject to final approval by PSC. FundScience is working on establishing similar partnerships with organizations across the country in order to service a broader population.
About PSC:
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company. Established in 1986, PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry, and is a partner in the National Science Foundation TeraGrid program.
Opinions Sought on Review Process – RC1 et al.
08.6.09 by Michelle Kienholz
Last week, a commenter on the RC1 thread asked for reflections on the two-stage peer review process, particularly the Editorial Boards:
Were you on an Editorial Board? I’d still love to hear more feedback on what the reviewers thought of those.
In fact, I’d love to hear more feedback on what applicants and reviewers felt about the Editorial Board review process in general. Independent of the huge numbers, short time frames and 1-2% success rate. Would you want regular study sections to use this process?
Other questions of interest to this individual (and others who have contacted me directly) include:
Was it rigorous? Did it seem like a waste of time? Were the scored apps of high quality? Did you feel rushed? Do you feel that better science got funded by the Editorial Board review process than if grants were picked by random lottery? Did the second level (after mail review) add anything?
Were new/unknown investigators at a disadvantage? Was science outside the interest/expertise of the Editorial Board members at a disadvantage?
I know some questions have come up about conflicts of interest among reviewers, which the NIH recently addressed in its Challenge Grant FAQ:
How were conflicts of interest managed for the Challenge reviews?
Given the volume of applications received and the compressed timeline for finishing the reviews, the NIH determined that it was necessary to recruit over 15,000 outstanding scientists to serve as mail reviewers (including some who would also be applicants). However, a Challenge applicant could only serve in the Challenge reviews as a mail reviewer and not as a study section member, and only for a study section(s) other than the one reviewing his/her application. Mail reviewers do not participate in the discussion or final scoring of the applications, and do not interact with other study section members.
Hmm. Except Editorial Board reviewers were asked to score applications based on the mail reviewer scores and critiques … though apparently most Editorial Board members felt they could not do so without looking at the original application … often leading to critiques of the mail reviewer critiques … and so on.
And heck, why stop at the special process used to review RC1s …. How do reviewers (and, I suppose, applicants) feel about the new review, scoring, and critique procedures?
One Editorial Board member told me that on more than one application, the mail reviewers had very divergent scores but were in agreement with their critiques/opinions, suggesting the learning curve will be steep on the uniform assignment of scores. Perhaps the NIH could use these thousands of clusters of three naive (in terms of the scoring procedure) reviewers looking at the same application to analyze patterns of score assignment against the written comments. I know just the person to write the grant application to fund this …
And what about the plan for increased use of alternatives to in-person study section meetings, which is when many of these finer points would be addressed and, of course, advocates speak out on behalf of specific applications.
Fire away, folks. The NIH needs all the feedback it can get.
| Posted in Grantsmanship, NIH Advice, Research News | Comments Off
What would science look like if it were invented today?
07.13.09 by Daniel Mietchen
Editor’s Note: The following is an article by guest blogger Daniel Mietchen, PhD, originially written up for the Euroscientist, the blog of Euroscience.org. This first part of a two-part series on “What would science look like if it were invented today?” deals specifically with the implications of the transition from paper-based to electronic communication for the process of knowledge creation. It delves into the importance of collaboration and openness in science. FundScience.org cross-posts this article, as well as the forthcoming second installment, because of our passion to promote open science and collaboration, not only between scientists, but between the scientific community and the public. Note that the drafting takes place in a wiki, so you can join in.
The Internet represents an opportunity to change this system, one which has created a 300-year-old, collective long-term memory, into something new and more efficient, perhaps adding in a current, collective short-term working memory at the same time. With new online tools, scientists could begin to share techniques, data and ideas online to the benefit of all parties, and the public at large. (Robert J. Simpson, paraphrasing Michael Nielsen)
Sure, it is hard to imagine you reading this blog post in a world which hadn’t yet engaged in science but the question “What would email look like if it were invented today” was recently addressed during the presentation of the Wave protocol, and entertaining some similar ideas on reinventing science may perhaps be worthwhile: how would a system have to be designed that creates and structures knowledge such that these two complex processes can effectively feed on and adapt to each other, making use of the most appropriate technologies at hand? Both processes are highly interrelated but to facilitate the discussion, we will first consider them separately (in this and the next issue of the Euroscientist), and then provide a synthesis (to which you can contribute).
| Posted in Research Resources | Comments Off
| Posted in FundScience News | Comments Off