Genetics 2010: Grants by the numbers
At the last evening keynote address for the MOHG, Jeremy Berg, the head of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences presented some early data coming out of the NIH’s new peer review policies instituted last year. As part of the new system, members of the review committees for grants are instructed to rate individual applications on a scale of 1 to 9 for the quality of five different categories: significance, investigator, innovation, approach, and environment (meaning the institutional support available to the investigator). Although these criteria are not calculated into the overall score upon which research decisions are made, Berg says they can serve as a parallel indicator of what the review panels seem to value the most. Read more