Funding agencies urged to check for duplicate grants

Self-plagiarism is an action that is very much despised in science. I have seen a professor who sent papers that were for all purposes identical to two high-profile journals, and that fellow never got a grant again from the major agency in his field. The EPSRC has a long memory, and this is how it ought to be.

Self-plagiarism on grant applications is a step up from this, and while one can imagine it happening, one would not think that it happens often.

$70 Million in overlapping funds in the last decade is quite trivial actually. Let's just say they looked through NSF and NIH grants (though I think they included DoE and DoD and probably other agencies I'm not thinking about). In 2006, the NSF received 5.58 Billion and the NIH recieved 28.7 billion. Budgets have increased to some extent under Obama, so later years are more, but 2006 probably cuts it down the middle.

So 10 * (5.58 + 28.7) = 342 Billion

$70 Million / 342 Billion = 0.02% of total funding to these agencies. That is not 2%. That is 2 one-hundredths of one percent.

On top of that, as others here have pointed out, these grants come with fairly strict guidelines as to how they can be spent. These funds are not going into reseracher's pockets. They are not going to bonuses. They are going to research and university overhead. This pays for equipment, supplies, travel, and employee (and grad student) wages.

0.02% potential overlap in funding just doesn't concern me. Now let us go worry about something else, preferrably something of greater importance and impact.

Grants go to organizations not people, and generally those organizations ensure that the money is spent legitimately. They don't allow a single person to collect two salaries. So if someone gets two grants for "the same" research, they'll have to employ more people or the same people for more months. One would assume that results in more or better research.

The comments to the Retraction Watch joint blog post about this Nature comment

http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/has-double-d...

tease out some of the details of what was reported and what implications the findings have for funding of scientific research. The Retraction Watch blog is a fun read in general, with many examples of published papers that are retracted when another scientist questions a published research finding on methodological grounds.

Scientists can quadruple dip for all I care. It's such a tiny concern, and I'm sure they actually need the money.

Corrupt politicians and financial institutions? There's something to be worried about.

... and I was hoping it's an article about public funded research, the results of which are sold to public again, via fancy schmancy journals subscriptions.

Nice. Wish I was as good at grant writing as Steven McIntire.

Research scientists will soon encounter similar pressures to entrepreneurs who negotiate the Medicare system. The scenario outlined in the article is similar to many of the prosecutions for "Medicare fraud".

Briefly, Medicare fraud is alleged whenever a business charges a lot to Medicare. This could be due to rapid growth or due to actual fraud, but it's immaterial. And often rapid growth happens due to exploitation of a previously unseen gray area (e.g. Facebook News Feed for Zynga) so regulators usually have an excuse to allege fraud. Unlike FB, they don't just block your API calls; the consequence of a new name appearing at the top of a "biggest earner list" is often a meteoric descent from a fast growing business into a federal prosecution.

NIH is much nicer than other HHS agencies, as its primary duty is to hand out money rather than enforce regulations. But what happened here is similar. Someone ran analytics to try and figure out which scientists were getting the most money from NIH, and to put some blocks on that in a time of scarce funds. In this case, the issue is that scientists naturally want to avoid duplication of work, and some projects require more funding than the limits of one grant. So they package up the same papers for different agencies with a different spin (bio-terrorism for DoD and bio-remediation for DoE). That's natural and good: leverage your existing work to get more money for the same amount of input. Put another way, this is like selling the same product (your research output) in multiple distribution channels.

However, problems arise with third party payment. I don't mind that you got a "duplicate" can of Coca Cola, or that the Coke company amortized labor across two different cans. But the government is ostensibly paying on behalf of the public for this work, and its incentives are more to keep scientists employed and to appear egalitarian than to maximize scientific productivity per se. It also wants to award less in grants while seeming "fair".

In any case, while nothing criminal/civil is being alleged now, I anticipate that grant agencies will make use of software that checks for duplicates in a way to reduce the outflow of money and make it harder for scientists to leverage the same work in multiple channels. The only silver lining here is that some scientists may start to explore non-governmental channels for funding, like patrons in the technology sector, or Kickstarters, or MOOCs, or other vehicles. Another response will be predator/prey like evasions by scientists, to set up grant collaboratives of K people in which the senior author is changed for each application. This will mean no individual scientist appears at the top of a list of "biggest earners", and is not targeted for duplication-based denials.