I think when a grant application has a section F15.5 there is a problem!
My latest application is running at 76 pages. Only about 8 pages is actually about science. The rest is administrative details, publication lists, statistics, budgets, justifications, and "bragging" about how great all the Investigators and their institutions are.
Every year more information is required and the applications get longer.
The problem may be that every year or so a new administrator decides it would be "helpful" to request an additional piece of information. But, adding just 7 per cent per year doubles the application length every decade....
Is this really necessary? Not only does it take a lot of time to prepare, but it also takes a lot of time to review. Actually, the painful reality is that most reviewers (including me, sorry) don't read much of the "fluff" but just focus in on a few key pieces of information: the science proposed, what the Investigators have recently achieved/published, and whether the budget is reasonable.
My question is: are there any funding agencies that are actually trying to reduce the length and complexity of applications?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Emergence and protein folding
Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatia...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...
-
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
No comments:
Post a Comment