The Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of the largest private scientific research funders in the world, announced last month that it would begin employing a partial randomization system to fund some types of research projects. For the next three years, the Copenhagen-based funding agency will use a combination of committee selection and a lottery system to choose some of the awardees of its $500,000 Project Grants in the fields of biomedicine, biotechnology, and natural and technical sciences, as well as its $800,000 Exploratory Interdisciplinary Synergy Grants. Together, these grants comprise roughly 10 percent of the organization’s total research project funding, says Lene Oddershede, the senior vice president of natural and technical sciences at the Novo Nordisk Foundation, who oversees the grant funding process. She says she hopes that the partial randomization system will reduce conscious and unconscious bias in the committee selection process and improve funding inequities.
“I think most researchers ...
