Drugmonkey

I tend to swing between bemusement and terror when considering the ridiculous things that NIH officialdom is willing to say about their grant awarding behavior. Particularly when I am not sure if the person making the statement is merely ignorant, unable to reason their way out of a paper bag or if they are blinded as an occupational hazard by the institutional obligations of being a part of NIH.

One of the first great arguments I had on this blog was with cannabis fans amongst the science blogging community. This was later followed up with another Grande Debate in the comments after I presented some evidence that cannabis withdrawal and nicotine withdrawal are very similar. People just love to talk about cannabis but their willingness to muddle up folk lore, stereotypes and anecdotes with a mimimal amount of cherry picked science always befuddled me.

I addressed the limitations to assuming that the review of your NIH grant proposal’s Approach drives your proposal’s outcome in review, in a recent post. My central thesis in this is that the strength and weakness bullet points that are written by the assigned reviewers are an exercise in confirming an overall impact position. This position can be a more implicit impression, it may derive in some arcane way from the reviewer’s consideration of your Approach.

In what is described as a “policy refresh” for 2025, the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has announced at two key changes. Requiring preprints and encouraging preprint review to make research publicly available when it’s ready. While researchers and authors can continue to publish in their journal of choice, preprints will help prioritize access to the research itself as opposed to access to a particular journal.