

Funding agencies urged to check for duplicate grants - ananyob
http://www.nature.com/news/funding-agencies-urged-to-check-for-duplicate-grants-1.12317

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HarryHirsch
Self-plagiarism is an action that is very much despised in science. I have
seen a professor who sent papers that were for all purposes identical to two
high-profile journals, and that fellow never got a grant again from the major
agency in his field. The EPSRC has a long memory, and this is how it ought to
be.

Self-plagiarism on grant applications is a step up from this, and while one
can imagine it happening, one would not think that it happens often.

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lawinslow
$70 Million in overlapping funds in the last decade is quite trivial actually.
Let's just say they looked through NSF and NIH grants (though I think they
included DoE and DoD and probably other agencies I'm not thinking about). In
2006, the NSF received 5.58 Billion and the NIH recieved 28.7 billion. Budgets
have increased to some extent under Obama, so later years are more, but 2006
probably cuts it down the middle.

So 10 * (5.58 + 28.7) = 342 Billion

$70 Million / 342 Billion = 0.02% of total funding to these agencies. That is
not 2%. That is 2 one-hundredths of one percent.

On top of that, as others here have pointed out, these grants come with fairly
strict guidelines as to how they can be spent. These funds are not going into
reseracher's pockets. They are not going to bonuses. They are going to
research and university overhead. This pays for equipment, supplies, travel,
and employee (and grad student) wages.

0.02% potential overlap in funding just doesn't concern me. Now let us go
worry about something else, preferrably something of greater importance and
impact.

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morpher
I stopped reading when I saw the 70 million number. The grants in question
were 1.2 million. So, if that is a representative number, then that is ~5
double dipped grants per year. Hard to be concerned about.

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wmf
Grants go to organizations not people, and generally those organizations
ensure that the money is spent legitimately. They don't allow a single person
to collect two salaries. So if someone gets two grants for "the same"
research, they'll have to employ more people or the same people for more
months. One would assume that results in more or better research.

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tokenadult
The comments to the Retraction Watch joint blog post about this Nature comment

[http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/has-
double-d...](http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/has-double-
dipping-cost-u-s-science-funding-agencies-tens-of-millions-of-dollars/)

tease out some of the details of what was reported and what implications the
findings have for funding of scientific research. The Retraction Watch blog is
a fun read in general, with many examples of published papers that are
retracted when another scientist questions a published research finding on
methodological grounds.

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jeffcutsinger
Scientists can quadruple dip for all I care. It's such a tiny concern, and I'm
sure they actually need the money.

Corrupt politicians and financial institutions? There's something to be
worried about.

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HarryHirsch
When you are working in the field, and you know that perhaps 10 % of all
grants are funded you will begin to care.

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MrVitaliy
... and I was hoping it's an article about public funded research, the results
of which are sold to public again, via fancy schmancy journals subscriptions.

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MrVitaliy
Nice. Wish I was as good at grant writing as Steven McIntire.

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temphn
Research scientists will soon encounter similar pressures to entrepreneurs who
negotiate the Medicare system. The scenario outlined in the article is similar
to many of the prosecutions for "Medicare fraud".

Briefly, Medicare fraud is alleged whenever a business charges a lot to
Medicare. This could be due to rapid growth or due to actual fraud, but it's
immaterial. And often rapid growth happens due to exploitation of a previously
unseen gray area (e.g. Facebook News Feed for Zynga) so regulators usually
have an excuse to allege fraud. Unlike FB, they don't just block your API
calls; the consequence of a new name appearing at the top of a "biggest earner
list" is often a meteoric descent from a fast growing business into a federal
prosecution.

NIH is much nicer than other HHS agencies, as its primary duty is to hand out
money rather than enforce regulations. But what happened here is similar.
Someone ran analytics to try and figure out which scientists were getting the
most money from NIH, and to put some blocks on that in a time of scarce funds.
In this case, the issue is that scientists naturally want to avoid duplication
of work, and some projects require more funding than the limits of one grant.
So they package up the same papers for different agencies with a different
spin (bio-terrorism for DoD and bio-remediation for DoE). That's natural and
good: leverage your existing work to get more money for the same amount of
input. Put another way, this is like selling the same product (your research
output) in multiple distribution channels.

However, problems arise with third party payment. I don't mind that you got a
"duplicate" can of Coca Cola, or that the Coke company amortized labor across
two different cans. But the government is ostensibly paying on behalf of the
public for this work, and its incentives are more to keep scientists employed
and to appear egalitarian than to maximize scientific productivity _per se_.
It also wants to award less in grants while seeming "fair".

In any case, while nothing criminal/civil is being alleged now, I anticipate
that grant agencies will make use of software that checks for duplicates in a
way to reduce the outflow of money and make it harder for scientists to
leverage the same work in multiple channels. The only silver lining here is
that some scientists may start to explore non-governmental channels for
funding, like patrons in the technology sector, or Kickstarters, or MOOCs, or
other vehicles. Another response will be predator/prey like evasions by
scientists, to set up grant collaboratives of K people in which the senior
author is changed for each application. This will mean no individual scientist
appears at the top of a list of "biggest earners", and is not targeted for
duplication-based denials.

