Italians are filing their taxes in these days, and they are given the opportunity to choose the charity to which they wish to donate 0.5% of it. Cinque per mille translates to 5‰, or 0.5%. It does add up. You can give it to non-profit organizations, or for scientific research, or for health research (curiously defined separately from scientific research).
It’s a new opportunity, dating back to the very near 2006. Before that, Italians had had the only choice of donating 0.8% to the Catholic Church of Rome, other religious institutions, or the State itself.
Naturally, adverts are everywhere on the street, TV, radio, and the web, to induce the taxpayers to donate their cinque per mille to this or that cause. In the case of scientific research, some of them are trying to convey the idea that if you donate to University XYZ its scientists will deliver results, so your money will be really well spent. This is not a trivial excercise, in a country where public funding to scientific research is among the lowest in Europe (see also this forum on the Italian NN group).
A peculiar aspect is that you can donate to individual institutes, not only to a foundation, say, which calls for scientific proposals. What happens to those money then? How are they transferred to Research? One Institute, while inviting the citizes to donate to them, denounces that they have not yet received the donations of either 2006 or 2007. Another highlights the fact that you can even donate to a specific, already existing project, presumably already funded, albeit minimally. This practice, arguably, bypasses peer-review, and may not be that a good thing to do. Opponents of this view, however, may argue that those projects have already passed peer-review – you wish – and would be just benefiting from additional, newly created funds. But then again, as wished by a given taxpayer, why should a particular, peer-reviewed project, be boosted with extra cash, leaving others behind, despite the fact that they also passed peer-review? Mmmmm.
Better perhaps to donate to organizations who will distribute funds strictly by the peer-review process, and to projects that have not seen the light yet. Well, this is, at least, the position of this humble blogger.
This sounds unbelievably chaotic, Massimo. Not to mention the fascinating concept of the taxpayer as peer-reviewer!
Life imitating art, or possibly, given the Roman context, Ars longa vita brevis (trans: ‘this bikini is too small’). Nature’s Futures has published two or three stories on what happens when science is given over to commercial pressure or (God forbid) if ‘the public’ has a direct say in how research funds are spent. See for example Shopping by Scott Seller-Mason.
Does this lead to scientists/ institutes explaining what they do to the public (I’m just wondering what the ‘ads’ trying to persuade people to plump for certain institutes by touting they’ll get ‘results’ look like)?
Maxine, yes I think it is chaotic. In essence, the taxpayers are given three options:
Sarbjit, the ads are very similar in nature. They mention how important (their) research is and what a difference to humanity it would make if you donated money to them. There is no detail of explanation to the level that you are referring to. The particular advert that irritated me was a dialogue between two young citizens; one was asking whether the researcher in XYZ University were really going to deliver results, and the other one replied, assuringly, that they were among the very best in Europe. Donating to them was a guarantee of success. Mmmmm. Scary.
Thanks, Massimo. I have blogged about this over at Peer to Peer.