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Comment by Kapura | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.”)

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.

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/...

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.

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