NIH limits scientists to six applications per year

From TFA:

"Lauer notes that not long before he left NIH, he and his colleagues identified a principal investigator (PI) who had submitted more than 40 distinct applications in a single submission round, most of which appeared to be partially or entirely AI generated. The incident was “stunning” and “disappointing,” says Lauer, who was not involved in creating the new NIH policy but hopes the cap will discourage other researchers from abusing the system."

Always somebody who ruins things for everybody else.

For perspective, the CS programs in the NSF already have a two-submission limit per year [1].

Besides reducing the incentive to spam, this rule has had another positive effect: As a researcher without funding, you don't have to spend your whole year writing grants. You can, instead, spend your time on actual research.

With that said, NIH grants tend to me much more narrow than CS ones, and I imagine that it takes a lot more grants to keep a lab going...

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/computer-informati...

Seems like a band-aid solution for a broken system.

But in general science will have to deal with that problem. Written text used to "proof" that the author spend some level of thought into the topic. With AI that promise is broken.

The same is happening in the Computer Security academic research realm. All of the four top conferences (USENIX Security, ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, and NDSS) have instituted a submission cap--you can't have your name on more than 6 papers being submitted in a given cycle. This has all happened within the last year, likely due to the same GenAI abuse that puts undue burden on PC reviewers.

This seems like a good example of a more general issue; when you have a machine that produces bullshit mixed with gem-like phraseology, at a pace that we cannot possibly match as humans, we may be faced with intellectual denial of service attacks.

There was a natural barrier of investing time into writing the proposal.

This barrier is clearly broken now.

A different barrier could be money that people submitting grant proposals would need to pay. First grant proposal could be $0, second $1, third $10, fourth $100, etc.

I think its fair that the decision criteria should be qualitative, its just a bummer that its happening at a time with a complicated political environment and dwindling research funds, making it harder for researchers

I'm curious for an economist's take here.

It seems to me that the incentives are such that now you've just guaranteed that all PIs will now submit 6 applications every year.

It may be less that what you originally were seeing, but I don't know the population stats.

It also may be that you've now poisoned all the other grant agencies (NSF, etc) and they'll soon have to have maximums too.

Where did the 6 application/year number come from? The justification seems a little fast-and-loose:

> According to the new notice, the number of PIs who submit more than six applications per year is “relatively low.”

I imagine that, given funding cuts, PIs are going to try to work harder to find funding opportunities (i.e. more proposals submitted) for insurance.

The decision criteria for NIH grants should be qualitative, not quantitative.

This reminds me of how I used to have spam-filled email inbox before I switched over to GMail. It almost feels like we are back to that state. There's now a large demand in keeping the context of humans free of AI bullshit. I wonder what the solution to this would look like? Identity-based blacklisting?

I can't speak to whether the 6 applications is the correct number, but it seems like a reasonable first pass to apply some limit as long as the NIH is closely monitoring this and modifying the restrictions as needed.