It's time to move to a literal research grant lottery

If you ask academic researchers about grant writing, many (if not most) of them will describe it as a lottery (for example, I made that point in a post last December). But, like any lottery, the only way to win is to buy a ticket. And so, many hours are spent on grant application writing, trying to create the 'perfect' grant application that will get funded. But maybe there is a better way?

The Health Research Council has been awarding its Explorer Grants using a modified lottery system since 2013. Is it a better system? It appears so, at least according to those who have been successfully funded. A new article (open access) by Mengyao Liu (Health Research Council) and co-authors, published in the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review, reports on a survey of Explorer Grant applicants. They find that:

There was agreement that randomisation is an acceptable method for allocating Explorer Grant funds with 63% (n = 79) positive.

However, this might be the most interesting bit from the article:

Respondents who had won funding were far more positive about the use of random funding allocation... Seventy-eight percent of respondents who had won Explorer Grant funding thought randomisation was acceptable, compared with 44% for those whose applications were declined by the panel. Similarly, far more applicants who had won funding supported an expansion of random funding into other grant types.

I guess that is a form of positivity bias? If you have been successful in the lottery, you are more likely to think that lotteries are a good way to allocate funding. But if you've been unsuccessful, you're more likely to disagree with them, probably thinking that your proposal would have been funded under a more 'equitable' funding allocation mechanism.

On the issue of equity though, I thought that this point from the article was important:

By reducing the role of people in decision making, lotteries also minimise the problems of sexism, racism and ageism influencing who receives funding...

I hadn't really considered that a benefit of randomisation before. Instead, I have long believed in randomisation simply because of a simple cost-benefit calculation - the time saving in peer review alone would be enormous. However, it appears that randomisation doesn't save the applicants time:

A surprising result was that most applicants did not reduce the amount of time they spent on the application... As one applicant commented, “I am pretty excited about this project and so, in the end, it [the random allocation] had no impact on the effort I put into preparing my bid.”

Overall, I'd say those results are pretty favourable to instituting a literal (rather than figurative) research funding lottery. Time savings, less focus on 'track record' (which privileges established names over early- and mid-career researchers), and less scope for bias, are all good reasons to support it. The time has come. We need research funding by lottery.

[HT: The New York Times, via Marginal Revolution]