The United States no longer leads the world in basic science. There is growing recognition of a gap in translational activities — the fruits of American research do not convert to economic benefits. As policymakers consider a slew of proposals that aim to restore American competitiveness with once-in-a-generation investments into the National Science Foundation (NSF), less discussion has been devoted to improving our research productivity — which has been declining for generations. Cross-agency data indicates that this is not the result of a decline in proposal merit, nor of a shift in proposer demographics, nor of an increase (beyond inflation) in the average requested funding per proposal, nor of an increase in the number of proposals per investigator in any one year. As the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) and House’s America COMPETES Act propose billions of dollars to the NSF for R&D activities, there is an opportunity to bolster research productivity but it will require exploring new, more efficient ways of funding research.
The NSF’s rigorous merit review process has long been regarded as the gold standard for vetting and funding research. However, since its inception in the 1950s, emergent circumstances — such as the significant growth in overall population of principal investigators (PIs) — have introduced a slew of challenges and inefficiencies to the traditional peer-review grant-making process: The tax on research productivity as PIs submit about 2.3 proposals for every award they receive and spend an average of 116 hours grant-writing per NSF proposal (i.e., “grantsmanship”), corresponding to a staggering loss of nearly 45% of researcher time; the orientation of grantsmanship towards incremental research with the highest likelihood of surviving highly-competitive, consensus-driven, and points-based review (versus riskier, novel, or investigator-driven research); rating bias against interdisciplinary research or previously unfunded researchers as well as reviewer fatigue. The result of such inefficiencies is unsettling: as fewer applicants are funded as a percentage of the increasing pool, some economic analysis suggests that the value of the science that researchers forgo for grantsmanship may exceed the value of the science that the funding program supports.
Our nation’s methods of supporting new ideas should evolve alongside our knowledge base. Science lotteries — when deployed as a complement to the traditional peer review grant process — could improve the systems’ overall efficiency-cost ratio by randomly selecting a small percentage of already-performed, high quality, yet unfunded grant proposals to extract value from. Tested with majority positive feedback from participants in New Zealand, Germany, and Switzerland, science lotteries would introduce an element of randomness that could unlock innovative, disruptive scholarship across underrepresented demographics and geographies.
This paper proposes an experimental NSF pilot of science lotteries and the Appendix provides illustrative draft legislation text. In particular, House and Senate Science Committees should consider the addition of tight language in the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (Senate) and the America COMPETES Act (House) that authorizes the use of “grant lotteries” across all NSF directorates, including the Directorate of Technology and Innovation. This language should carry the spirit of expanding the geography of innovation and evidence-based reviews that test what works.