As of January 25 of this year, the National Institutes of Health has shortened the page limits for most sections of its grant applications, brining the total page limit for R01 grants down from 25 to 12. While many scientific editors advocate a shorter-is-better philosophy all the time, with the new application format, "you need to jam things into a shorter space," says Timothy Taylor of BiomEditor.
For the most part, editors agree, the change is a good one. "The old paradigm of mapping out in grueling detail what you're going to do four years down the road is pretty difficult," Taylor explains, where as the new guidelines "demand that you're not going to explain every bit of the process that you plan to go through."
But it's a change that will take some getting used to, says Kathleen Hayes-Ozello, an editor at BioScience Writers. "It's going to be problematic ...
