NIH will eliminate many peer review panels, lay off scientists overseeing them
16 comments
·March 10, 2025Kapura
sebazzz
I’m only slightly familiar with the academic process. Who reviews the peer reviewer?
Volundr
Since we are talking NIH, there is an appeals process in place [1].
1. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/nihgps/html5/section_2/...
SubiculumCode
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.
pjc50
[flagged]
readthenotes1
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...
null
parsimo2010
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.
uolmir
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.
declan_roberts
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.
blackeyeblitzar
Washington Monument Syndrome
exe34
This is great, Elon will replace them with Grok and make a ton of profit!
z3c0
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.
SubiculumCode
THis has nothing to do with what is changing.
null
I do not want our science institutions to be pinching pennies and cutting peer reviewers. It sounds like an invitation to widespread academic fraud.