WASHINGTON—The National Institutes of Health is changing the way that it does business with the research community. More than a half-dozen experiments are underway to improve the peer-review system—the tool NIH uses to weed out nearly two-thirds of the proposals it examines from those it will find.
Most researchers consider peer review to be a pillar of science, ranking with motherhood and apple pie as paragons of virtue in an imperfect world. At the same time, many complain that its vision is a conservative one that favors the tried and true. While those criticisms are not new (see The Scientist, May 16, page 21; and July 11, page 13), they resurfaced repeatedly during a recent cycle of meetings held across the country on federal support for biomedical research.
Those criticisms have nourished a process begun last year to improve the way that NIH picks its winners. Each of the half-dozen ...
