FLICKR, IMAGES_OF_MONEYUS funding agencies may have awarded millions of dollars in duplicate grants because they do not properly check applications for overlap, according to an analysis published yesterday (January 30) as a peer-reviewed comment in Nature.
Virginia Tech bioinformatician Harold Garner and colleagues estimated that funding bodies have spent $70 million on overlapping grants in the past decade. They arrived at the figure by searching 850,000 US grant applications available in publicly accessible databases, including submissions to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Using text-mining software developed by Garner, they pulled out 1,300 applications with potential overlap, and after a manual review identified 167 pairs that were “very similar.”
Garner’s team did not identify the applications in question, because they did not have full access to the documents to carry out a full assessment. But the Nature news team obtained the files on 22 pairs of similar grants through the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and ...
