World Association of Young Scientists

This is a response to Richard Grant's On article-level metrics and other animals where the html did not come through.

Yes, Richard, such an experiment is definitely overdue! I have actually sketched out a grant proposal along these lines, for a two-step funding scheme on Europe and Global Challenges (Eur 50,000 in the first phase, 1,000,000 in the second, for which independent submissions are permitted), to be submitted in collaboration with Richard Gordon and Bryan Poulin (the authors of the above-mentioned study) as well as Brian Czech. Since useful stats can only be gathered if there is a high number of projects, it was foreseen to have projects of Eur 1,000 each - a scale inappropriate for multiple research projects but probably suitable for multiple small projects that allow graduate students some a little bit of independent research, e.g. on a sideline of their PhD thesis. Due to the low overall budget, basically no money would be available for project administration, so the allocation procedure would have to be simple, and we chose a competition, which would probably fall somewhere next to C in your scheme - going for random allocation did not stand any chance to pass the peer review process for the call. Given that the funding agencies already have the data on group A (any other Eur 50,000 they have spent previously, perhaps even on peer review, as detailed in the paper the above-mentioned above), the aim of the project would be to test whether these multiple small-scale projects would result in higher impact per budget than the control group. The project should be conducted as an open science project, such that everybody can observe the results as they come in and see for themselves whether this model works at this scale. Knowing that all this is unusual, we contacted the funding agencies that had issued the call, and invited them to give some initial feedback. This turned out to be very discouraging (for three main reasons: i - the focus of the call is on global governance, for which scientists like Gordon and me and economists like Poulin and Czech were considered a non-ideal match, ii - the allocation of research funds was not seen as a global challenge, iii - some of their internal policies not mentioned in the call), and so we finally decided not to submit at this first stage. However, reason iii would not apply for the second stage, and the larger budget then (plus the additional time) would allow to build a team that fits better to their grid, and to make a stronger case for the proper allocation of research funds as a current challenge at both the European and the global level. So we definitely plan to submit a proposal for the second stage and possibly elsewhere as opportunities arise, and we would welcome anyone interested in these matters to work out such proposals together, preferably in the open, like in our wiki linked from above.