NIH will eliminate many peer review panels, lay off scientists overseeing them | Hacker News Reader

NIH will eliminate many peer review panels, lay off scientists overseeing them

science.org

56 pointsrbanffy16 comments

I do not want our science institutions to be pinching pennies and cutting peer reviewers. It sounds like an invitation to widespread academic fraud.

What's the replicability rate now ? Pretty dismal, iirc.

As for fraud, there's already plenty of it. E.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_misconduc...

And now this known problem will become worse and more damaging.

I'm not sure what your comment was going for here, attempting to dismiss the harm here because the system was already less than perfect?

A solution would be to increase the NIH budget, and pay for more replication studies and more expert peer reviewers to carefully review studies before they are published or before their findings are incorporated elsewhere. Everything that's happening under the current administration is making this problem worse.

There's no need to employ as many reviewers since they are also cutting funding for many studies and therefore have many fewer papers and proposals coming through.

I’m only slightly familiar with the academic process. Who reviews the peer reviewer?

Since we are talking NIH, there is an appeals process in place [1].

1. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/nihgps/html5/section_2/...

Ihave no opinion about this yet, but this is, I believe, about centralizing the NIH process for setting up study sessions for reviews on grants, not the reviewing itself.

Slightly relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43306435 (“A Post Mortem on the Gino Case”: “Committing fraud is, right now, a viable career strategy that can propel you at the top of the academic world.”)

From the article this seems much less bad than the headline might imply. This idea predates trump and it does not eliminate scientific review of proposals. That said, whether the cost savings itself is worth what might be a diminishment in review quality is hard to say. I can only comment from the NSF side of things to say that peer review of proposals is a mixed bag and will unavoidably run into human error and individual predispositions regarding scientific importance so maybe this isn't a bad approach to try.

I've heard often from those of anti-science persuasions that the basis for their beliefs is a deterioration of integrity in the research community at the hands of capital and/or liberal interests. Of course, there's a tinge of truth to that fear, thanks to the replication crisis and all.

That said, I'm struggling to see how this would address that problem. If anything, it seems that it will make the problem of unreplicated research worse. I fear that is the real intent here.

THis has nothing to do with what is changing.

It seems every single one of our publicly funded institutions that are being asked to do more with less (money) is responding by cutting very public and important programs and then contacting a publication to write a news story about it.

Washington Monument Syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome

This is great, Elon will replace them with Grok and make a ton of profit!

Basically Thats the plan, to replace everything with Grok. So everyone and everyone's information will be under one roof. Just like the social system in china, but with a mildly psychotic bipolar Ai.

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