David Gurwitz; Elena Milanesi; Thomas Koenig

“ But like democracy, peer review is a principle that requires specific arrangements in order to be effective. If funders want to retain the status of peer reviewing as the fairest method of distributing funds to researchers, they must embrace transparency more actively. ”

“ Better transparency of the grant funding selection process would enable researchers and the public to have a better understanding of how public money is spent on scientific research; it will contribute to improved public trust in scientific research integrity while creating a new intersection for public engagement with scientific research without being detrimental to its quality or to peer review integrity. ”

“ With scientific knowledge production being increasingly enabled through peer review, and this knowledge often playing part in societal dynamics, procedural robustness and distributive efficiency of public research funding may lose their bite. ”

“ As an interim step toward more radical transparency of grant review, we believe that openly publishing the final assessment of the scientific review panel—currently published by none of the surveyed funding agencies—is the least likely to cause concerns for reviewers and funders, while going a long way toward engaging the public and increasing their trust in fairness of the grant review process and thereby in scientific research. ”

“ What does that have to do with peer reviewing? A lot, actually. The ever growing competition on limited biomedical research funding means that more scientists submit applications for each call every year, further straining the peer review process. In the United States, the success rate of NIH grants combined has fallen from 34% in 2001 to 19% in 2012, while that of new targeted proposals fell from 28% to 14% during the same period [13] . Similar trends are evident across the globe; grant application success rates for many public funding agencies in 2012 were below 25% (Table 1) . ”

“ To open up the knowledge items in the content and expertise, categories would follow a very practical consideration. With all the time invested by scientists in writing reviews that remain basically invisible, making this valuable work openly accessible would avoid “reviewers' fatigue” that funders often complain about, as reviewers would know that their laborious contribution is fully acknowledgeable. ”

“ When it comes to the unsuccessful applicants and their proposals, the general assumption is that they are better off by being shielded from the public, as well as their peers, because of risk to their reputation. ”

“ Admittedly, all that sounds unlikely in the context of today's realities, not only because we lack the evidence, but also because it is difficult to overcome the concerns from researchers, reviewers, and funders alike. Due to the logic prevalent in academic research, the concerns relate primarily to competition within the research community. Grant winners fear that their research ideas, as well as unpublished data included in their applications may be used by competitors if rendered publicly available. ”

“ Adopting a common policy of publishing the final assessments would allow unsuccessful applicants the opportunity to see whether their ambitions are vindicated and, potentially, to improve their proposal based on the feedback. ”