Government fraud watchdogs have more than tripled the size of grants for studying the integrity of research, raising the stakes in a new and controversial area of study.
Last year's round of grants for research on research integrity was capped at a maximum of $100,000 per year for 2 years. This year, grants will cover as much as $750,000 in direct costs over 3 years, according to the request for applications posted last week by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) at the Department of Health and Human Services.
"We hope we'll be able to support more complicated research," said Mary Scheetz, ORI's research director. "A higher dollar value in the grants increases the possibility of getting heavy-hitting research."
The move comes as the first batch of ORI-funded studies move toward publication. A study of how institutions deal with researcher conflicts of interest, for example, is headed for the presses—at...