This is wrong with the distribution of research funds

Seen from afar, all granting procedures are the same. You write a proposal, send it to the grant provider, and they usually say no, and sometimes yes. But if you look closely, you suddenly see variations.

In the small difference category: the time of maturity. Almost every procedure has a submission deadline. Usually a time is also given with this date. It’s often midnight. Logically, it’s the end of the day. Sometimes it’s 5 p.m. Also understandable, end of working day. The largest provider of scholarships in academic Dutch

country, NWO, however, uses a different time: 2 p.m. They’ve been doing this for years, it must be useful from an organizational point of view, but I find it annoying. 2pm isn’t the natural end of anything, so while you’re stressed out trying to perfect your app, you still have to watch the clock all the time.

DIY request

It doesn’t always go well. A colleague had written a nice proposal, wanted to submit it by the submission date, logged into NWO at 3 p.m., then suddenly remembered NWO’s idiosyncratic deadline policy. Luck lost.

He had wanted to apply for a new type of grant, called Open Competition SGW-XS. SGW stands for Social Sciences and Humanities, XS refers to the size: 50,000 euros, for a project of one year maximum – this is very short for scientists.

The XS is not only smaller than many other grants, the rating is also different. Applications are generally evaluated by a committee, often with the help of outside experts. Not for the XS application, where candidates assess each other. This speeds up the procedure enormously, as finding external evaluators takes a lot of time.

All applications are divided into two groups, each applicant from Group A evaluates ten applications from Group B, and vice versa. Each application therefore receives ten evaluations, in the form of a score between 1 and 10, after some calculations a ranking follows, and NWO is made.

An experiment that was carried out four times last year. Or three times in fact, because there were so few applicants in the first round of applications in September that NWO decided to merge rounds 1 and 2. They could have just given a grant to all applicants in the first round, but the belief in competition is apparently so deep in NWO that they create artificial scarcity when needed. Bad luck for the bidders in round 1, and lucky for my colleague, because his missed deadline was in round 1, so in the end it doesn’t matter.

After this merger, you suddenly heard rumors at every search meeting about a new grant with very few applicants. A chance at money! A good scientist got into this, so last spring I also wrote an XS app. On April 20, at 1:30 p.m., I submitted; in May, I evaluated ten other applications, and received the results earlier this week. My request has been approved.

Is it really something else?

And since then, I wonder what I think of it. As a candidate, I am very satisfied, but also quite biased. As a reviewer, I was not disappointed. The variety of research proposals was fun to read, and more than I expected, I felt like I could actually separate the good and not so good proposals.

Again. As much as I appreciate NWO’s willingness to experiment, I think we’re solving the wrong problem here. If you look closely, something changes, but from afar everything remains the same: almost all research money is divided into contests.

To really do things differently, less money should go to the NWO and more directly to the scientists. So that all scientists have time to do research from time to time, and no one has to miss a deadline.