Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding

"I spent the early years of my PhD at an Austrian non-academic research institute, where competing for grants was the only way that my colleagues and I could secure funding for our research. Everything else we did, from publishing papers to presenting at conferences, felt designed, ultimately, to help secure the next grant. The system seemed back to front: surely it should be about the science first?"

"In science, there are many more people with ideas than there are public resources to support those ideas, which raises an unavoidable question about how to allocate scarce resources. Determining the best way to do so is extremely difficult. In an egalitarian approach, everyone would receive an equal share, even if that was only a fraction of what their projects would need."

"Which funding schemes encourage researchers to pursue high-risk research? How do different funding schemes affect scientists themselves, and what ethical issues arise from them? I suspect that because competition had been a constant companion on my path to becoming a professor at the Vienna University of Technology (perhaps even paving the way), I developed a particular interest in analysing its implications."

Competition pervades academic life, determining positions, promotions, publications, presentations, and crucially funding. Grant competition can dominate research activities when grants are the primary funding route, causing publishing and presenting to serve grant-seeking. Scientific idea supply exceeds public funding, creating hard choices about allocating scarce resources. Allocation options include egalitarian distribution, strict merit-based selection, or institutional discretion, but competitive selection has become widespread and is framed as efficient, fair and reliable. Questions arise about how funding schemes influence the pursuit of high-risk research, affect researchers, and generate ethical concerns. Metascience examines these systemic effects on how research is conducted.

Read at Nature