First country to outsource peer review: pride or shame?
Massimo Pinto
Saturday, 27 June 2009 20:52 UTC
Ten days ago Nature published an article1 reporting the first, on-going peer-review outsourcing project conducted between two countries. The reviewers will be chosen from the NIH databases, and the country which commissioned the review of a 1,000-ish grants is…yes you guessed it right: Italy. Having grants reviewed by international referees is common practice. However, that a country decides to ousource the review of grants submitted as part of an entire funding call is, reportedly, unprecedented.
Readers may believe that this is a matter of pride, as Italy got ‘there’ first. Pride is not. Clearly, such an operation was orchestrated because, apparently, peer review is seldom applied in Italy, and when it is applied, it is plagued with alleged illicit funding allocation, fueled by conflicts of interest. Hence, if you do want a transparent process, you ought to have it outsourced. That’s bordering humiliation, but in the end, it’s going to be a real selection.
In the cited article1, Nature gave some basic bits of information about the funding call for which grant applications are going to be evaluated at NIH. Given such details, one may almost surely point a finger to the December 2008’s call directed to Young Researchers, seeking to become PIs for three years, and asking for about 0.5M Euros to do so. That’s pretty interesting per se, as it’s been almost impossible to obtain news about this call. Appilcants have, therefore, learned from Nature something new about this competition. And what news are these: their Grant application is going to be reviewed at NIH and they are likely to be part of a real competition. May the best win, really.
Added on June 28: Readers may find a previous discussion about the Nature1 article on Cath Ennis’ blog
1 ‘Italy outsources peer review to NIH’, by Richard Van Noorden, Nature 17 June 2009 Vol 459, 900.
Updated 28 June 2009 14:58 UTC
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Replies
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I like it.
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I think that Italy, as any other EU country, should choose and use the reviewers that are already active for European projects. If we like to live in a “larger world” we have to be ready to abandon old ideas and schemes. In this respect I am in favor of the NIH experiment. However, this should be just the first step toward a more intelligent organization of peer review procedures in Italy.
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Maybe it is time to start a pan-european system to review not only EU-sponsored projects but those paid by the national goverments?
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I guess an international approach to peer review is important to find the most qualified scientists to evaluate a given research project. In fact sometimes, depending on the research topic, the best researchers in the field might be working in a different country from the one of the researcher proposing the project. Nonetheless total outsourcing might not be the best solution.
Maybe it would be a good idea to set up in Italian national research agency (similar to the ones exiting in other European countries) to manage both funding calls and the international grant review process?
_________________Some examples of funding agencies in Europe (some I knew of and some I found by Google searches): Germany (DFG), France (ANR), United Kingdom (several depending on the subject – RCUK), Netherlands (NWO), Spain (CSIC), Sweden (VR), Denmark (FI), Finland (several depending on the subject – AKA), …
Note: as I left 11 years ago, immediately at the end of my studies, I do not have any grant application experience in Italy – thus I apologise if similar structures are already in place and I did not know about them.
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There is an interesting follow-up to this outsourcing habit, involving Ireland this time
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