Red tape and research funding
How much research bureaucracy is enough?
No one likes bureaucracy, least of all researchers. It is “the death of all sound work,” declared Albert Einstein. Max Pertuz, another Nobel prize winner, was also against it: “Creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organized. It arises spontaneously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but hierarchical organization, inflexible, bureaucratic rules, and mounds of futile paperwork can kill it.”
Perutz, unlike Einstein, had experience of directing a laboratory and tangled with the administrative red tape that cannot be avoided if research activities are to be “well run”. That requires securing resources, which in the 21st century inevitably means winning the intense and intensely bureaucratic competition for funding.
Researchers and funders alike have for many years bemoaned the paperwork and time demanded by grant funding processes that are onerous for applicants, grant officers, reviewers and grant panel members, and often struggle to break free of demands for feasibility, diminishing the prospects for risk-taking investigators. It’s a problem that Adam Golbarg has recently grappled with on this Substack. Today we are casting the net wider. In a review published this week as a RoRI working paper, we look at the more recent efforts that have been made to reduce the workloads involved in securing research support by paving the way for faster and more flexible routes to funding.
We find that while there have been many studies and interventions in grant funding processes over the years, it is difficult to draw conclusions that are fully coherent and convincing. At best, efforts to reduce the bureaucratic burden, either through shorter application forms, two-stage processes, assigning decision-making responsibility to programme managers or providing investigator latitude over the longer term, have had mixed success. Assessing the burden and impact of various approaches to research funding is burdensome in its own right. As a result, most studies have focused on a single scheme within a single national context, which frustrates comparison between different funders and makes it difficult to draw lessons that might meaningfully be applied across the research ecosystem.
That said, there are glimmers of hope, though additional work will be needed to provide more rigorous tests of the reports that have shown promise. We believe that substantial further progress can be made in reducing workloads and increasing appetites for risk if future experiments are better grounded in the realities of research and proceed on a more international basis. We have highlighted three important lessons from our survey of the recent literature on research funding bureaucracy.
First, given the wide range of valuable outcomes arising from research (e.g. disciplinary advances, researcher training, societal and technological impacts), we should abandon any notion of optimising grant funding processes, and focus instead on the more realistic option of identifying and refining effective practices. Of course, that approach should not preclude testing out entirely new procedures – which may well be needed to cope with the burdens and uncertainties that the influx of AI into research and research funding practices has dragged in its choppy wake.
Second, funders need to work harder to create and defend spaces for real risk-taking, something that organisations disbursing government funds may find particularly challenging when the political weather changes. A strong case can be made based on historical precedent, but it needs to be made and remade; not least because researchers take their cues from the mood music they hear from funders. That case also needs to be grounded in reality. Stuart Buck’s and Aishwarya Khanduja’s argument at The Good Science Project that research funders should operate more like venture capitalists, was rightly dragged down to Earth by critique from Jeremy Berg that was rooted in his real-world experience as a researcher and a funder.
Third, to get beyond the limitations of single scheme and single funder studies, funders and the metascientific community need to collaborate across national boundaries. This would facilitate work to agree common requirements for the data that should be gathered to assess the performance of research funding processes (e.g. the time and costs of different elements of application and review processes; and, more ambitiously, evaluations of outcomes such as publications, data, training, and non-academic impact). As an international institute supported by funders who are also research partners, RoRI is already developing data tools and experimental platforms that will assist with this effort.
Ultimately, we are looking for an answer to the question: how much bureaucracy is really needed to effectively allocate research funding? However much it might please Albert Einstein, the answer cannot be “None”. It may well be that there is no one right answer, or that the answer will change with shifts in technology or scientific norms. There will always be trade-offs to be made between the bureaucratic burden in allocating research funds and assessing the various returns on that investment. No doubt there will always also be differing points of view on how best to balance them! So please take a look at our review and let us know what you think. It is in everyone’s interest that we work together systematically to ease the load.