Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding

"Competition is a constant fixture of academic life. We compete for positions, promotions, publications and presentations. And we also compete for money, a necessary requirement if we are to continue taking part in the academic endeavour. I spent the early years of my PhD at an Austrian non-academic research institute, where competing for grants was the only way that my colleagues and I could secure funding for our research."

"In science, there are many more people with ideas than there are public resources to support those ideas, which raises an unavoidable question about how to allocate scarce resources. Determining the best way to do so is extremely difficult. In an egalitarian approach, everyone would receive an equal share, even if that was only a fraction of what their projects would need. An alternative would be to use strict merit criteria, or to allow institutions to decide how they want to distribute resources."

"My main research focuses on using computational tools to analyse intelligent systems, but I have found myself increasingly questioning how the ways in which we fund science shape its outcomes. Which funding schemes encourage researchers to pursue high-risk research? How do different funding schemes affect scientists themselves, and what ethical issues arise from them?"

Competition permeates academic life, influencing hiring, promotion, publication and presentation efforts. Grant funding often becomes the primary mechanism sustaining research, and institutional experiences show that many academic activities can be directed toward securing the next grant. A persistent imbalance exists between the number of ideas and available public resources, creating difficult allocation choices such as egalitarian splits, merit-based selection, or institutional distribution. Competitive allocation has become widespread. Important questions include which funding schemes foster high-risk research, how funding models affect researcher behavior and wellbeing, and what ethical challenges emerge from funding-driven incentives.

Read at Nature