Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 15 October 2008 | Nature 455, 841 (2008) | doi:10.1038/455841a
News
No more third time lucky
NIH clamps down on proposal resubmissions.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced last week that biomedical researchers will be able to amend and resubmit a failed funding application only once. Applicants whose grants are unfunded after the second submission may reapply only after designing a new proposal.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
The three-submission process resulted in a cumulative success rate of about 70%, as opposed to the <15% success rate of first submissions. I don't think that losing 10% of their submissions will really streamline the process. Furthermore, as the story mentions, this puts a further burden on young PIs (although study sections are instructed to flag new investigators for special attention). It will be intersting to see how this plays out over the next few years, assuming it lasts that long. However, as a young investigator preparing his first R01 I am glad my submission date falls before the cut-off...
For those readers who do not know about the excellent value-for-money UK funding system, here the Research Councils (of which two, the MRC and the BBSRC cover NIH's territory) and the Wellcome Trust operate a no re-submission policy, although depending on the subject area an applicant might be able to submit a proposal rejected by one to the others. However, for the Research Councils (but not usually for Wellcome) applicants do get a short window (in time and words) before the grant review panel sits to see and respond to the ad hoc reviewers' comments.