\n<\/p>\n
The NIH and NSF, which both fund research, gave staff new grant review instructions this month.<\/p>\n
sorbetto | DigitalVision Vectors<\/p>\n
Two major federal research funding agencies are altering their grant review processes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, according to a Dec. 1 internal memo that Science <\/em>obtained and published, while STAT <\/em>reported that the National Institutes of Health distributed guidance Friday ordering staff to use a \u201ctext analysis tool\u201d to search for certain phrases.<\/p>\n The NSF memo says the government shutdown, which ended in November, hampered its progress toward doling out all its funding by the end of the new fiscal year. It said \u201cwe lost critical time\u201d and \u201cnow face [a] significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels. In parallel, our workforce has been significantly reduced.\u201d <\/p>\n The memo said the changes \u201cenable Program Officers to expedite award and decline decisions,\u201d including by moving away from the \u201cusual three or more reviews\u201d of proposals. It said that, now, \u201cfull proposals requiring external review must be reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers or have a minimum of two reviews. An internal review may substitute for one.\u201d<\/p>\n NSF spokesperson Mike England didn\u2019t provide Inside Higher Ed<\/em> the memo. He said in an email that the changes are \u201cpart of a comprehensive approach to streamlining processes and reducing administrative burden\u201d and \u201calso help expedite the processing of shutdown-related backlogs while maintaining the rigor of the external merit review process.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the NIH guidance, while it instructs program officers on how to review and possibly terminate grants, STAT <\/em>reported that \u201csome outside experts said the guidance is a positive step, making future terminations more of a dialogue that researchers can push back on.\u201d <\/p>\n But another media outlet, NOTUS,<\/em> published a more critical article on the guidance, saying the \u201cTrump administration is pausing new funding for National Institutes of Health grants that include terms like \u2018health equity\u2019 and \u2018structural racism,\u2019 pending review.\u201d NOTUS <\/em>reported that the guidance says new funding won\u2019t be provided to \u201cmisaligned\u201d grants until \u201call areas of non-alignment have been addressed.\u201d <\/p>\n Both articles said NIH ordered staff to use a \u201ccomputational text analysis tool\u201d to scan current and new grants for terms that may mean the submissions are misaligned with NIH priorities. (The NSF memo similarly said \u201cProgram Officers are also expected to maximize their use of available automated merit review tools, especially tools that identify proposals that should be returned without review.\u201d)<\/p>\n Andrew G. Nixon, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department, which includes NIH, didn\u2019t provide Inside Higher Ed<\/em> a copy of the NIH guidance. In an email, he wrote that \u201cclaims that NIH issued a \u2018banned words list\u2019 or conducted word searches to remove specific terms from grants are unequivocally false. NIH has never prohibited the use of any particular words in grant applications.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The NIH and NSF, which both fund research, gave staff new grant review instructions this month. sorbetto | DigitalVision Vectors Two major federal research funding agencies are altering their grant review processes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, according to a Dec. 1 internal memo that Science obtained<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37887,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[4639,1291,13533,405,4694,20851,20850,1085],"class_list":{"0":"post-37886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-grant","9":"tag-hunts","10":"tag-lowers","11":"tag-nih","12":"tag-nsf","13":"tag-phrases","14":"tag-requirements","15":"tag-review"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}