Posted for Richard Van Noorden

A month after British scientists successfully protested against one of their research council’s policies, they’re at it again – this time, with a wider beef.

In May, researchers overturned a controversial banning policy [subscription required] from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. An electronic petition to Downing Street kicked off that campaign, and attracted over 2,000 signatures.

Last Tuesday another scientist-backed e-petition went live – it’s garnered over 1,100 signatures so far. The petition, organized by John Allen, a biochemist at Queen Mary University of London, requests to reverse a policy applied by UK research councils that “directs funds to projects whose outcomes are specified in advance.”

Philip Moriarty, a physicist at the University of Nottingham, UK, explains in more concrete terms: “The key thing to which we’re objecting is a two page economic impact plan that must be submitted with every grant proposal, across all councils, and which will be used to bias the peer review process away from the selection of basic, blue skies science.”

Debate on the pros and cons of this policy has been smouldering in blogs and letters since it was introduced in January, with both sides putting their case. As government and research councils turn their focus increasingly to economic justification of research, an e-petition takes the opposition up a notch. Watch this space.