Stirring up the Scientific Research for Social Purpose

Scientific research suffers due to faulty research funding systems

Most science projects (including scientist salaries) are funded through a grueling process of application to government agencies and private foundations for grants. Navigating the bureaucratic labyrinth and submitting grant applications can take as much as 40 percent of research investigators work time.

Funding agencies receiving grant applications implement a peer review process to choose the proposals they can fund using the skimpy resources they administer. The peer review boards (eg. Study Sections in NIH) most frequently include front competitors of the applicants. The peer review board members are frequently on the lookout for new ideas and they also promote their own ideas for funding at the very same institutions…

In this tough budget time for all federal organizations and private research fundraising organizations alike scientific research is experiencing a relatively flat budget for the past seven years and is facing a continuation of this pattern or perhaps even declining budgets for 2013 and beyond.

The current situation creates a vicious cycle. With more and more people applying for each grant, an individual’s chances of winning decrease, so scientists must submit ever more proposals to stay even.

The current system makes inefficient use of scientists’ time and inclines funding  agencies to favor worthy but incremental research over risky but potentially transformative work. It is not surprising that leading cancer researchers believe that the war on cancer would make more progress if funders took more risks.

Yet another aspect of the growing inefficiency of the science research system today due to unprecedented funding restriction is the loss of the best experienced staff. With not sufficient lab funding Primary Investigators are forced  to let go the highest paid lab members, who on the other hand are also the most experienced lab members, scientists and technologists alike.

Nevertheless, in current funding situation  an enormously big chunk of research money goes to the overgrown research administration. Up to 40% of each federally funded research proposal money goes to so called indirect costs, which is to cover administration.  It is even worse in many private fundraising institutions where the initial costs before sponsoring any grants can come up to as much as  80% of raised funds. Thus, practically they are fundraising on big claims, to mostly sponsor their own staff and expenses.

In the current situation the status quo of scientific research funding is not sustainable and the current funding systems hamper the scientific research progress.

We at the Research Stir aim to stir the scientific research by innovative resourcing methods that would promote scientific research openness as well as promote a risky but potentially transformative research work. Please join us in reaching that goal.

Scientific research suffers due to faulty research collaboration

Asuccessful collaboration is imperative for prosperous scientific research in virtually all major disciplines today. There’s a well-established notion in much of the scientific community that big breakthroughs occur when people work together and when they can combine experiences and lab resources for a common goal. Such collaboration gives rise to breakthrough findings and publications reaching the covers of top science journals and can be the foundation of a successful career.

Unfortunately, collaboration especially across different disciplines, is full of obstacles and hesitation. Scientists under the time pressure of grant writing requirements, publication review processes and daily lab administration feel too busy to engage into new, frequently difficult to ensure future prospect, joint projects. Nevertheless, for many scientist collaboration becomes the only way to move their projects forward and they realize that they have to stand up and fight the obstacles and hesitation to develop new collaborative approaches.

The existing administrative systems in most scientific institutions today do not actively encourage their researchers to get engaged in new collaborations. At times, especially if that concerns outside collaboration, the institutional practices even discourage their members from forming joint projects. In such environment most collaborations start with a pure chance of encountering another scientist or relevant projects, through a scientific symposium, research publication, general research news flash or a helpful ear and mouth of a fellow departmental colleague. As inefficient as they are these are the major driving forces for establishing successful scientific collaboration today.

The even more worrisome trend is that in majority of the recently ubiquitously created "multicenter" and "trans-disciplinary" by name research institutions, the scientists there still work in isolation in labs formed according to obsolete arrangement systems. These institution, besides catchy but false in nature names, do not bring any real changes in the scientific collaboration system. To make a true change in research collaboration on an institutional level it would require to establish true opened research institutions. Such institutions would need to be based on opened lab structure and on ideas brainstorming for research directions. The multicenter" and "trans-disciplinary" institutions today are still formed on the feudal in nature, Primary Investigator (PI) driven lab structures.

In today’s labs based on feudal structures of doing scientific research a small group of scientists and research technologist depend on and follow a single PI, where his/her sole research directives are applied for finding and pursuing research directions. It is obvious that the PIs primary goals are to secure and promote their own research career before engaging into breakthrough and transforming, but frequently career risky, research directions. The PI (Group Leader in Europe) based systems are obsolete and research retarding today. Unfortunately, the current research system structures with their well rooted and defensive, concerning any changes, administrative organizations might delay by eons any chance of making fruitful transformation there. Thus, the best thing that can be done immediately is to try to guide and connect the isolated and frustrated scientists so they could explore their bright ideas in a collaborative projects anyway, independent of the circumstances. One step at a time the research environment can be challenged and changed through evolution and not revolution, when there is no ground for, and where powerful opposition to true scientific revolution exist.

There is a long list of obstacles that discourage scientist from engaging into new collaborations. Among the most influential are:

Funding Restrictions – there is too few resources to turn in for securing the funding of collaborative research

Policy Restrictions and Bureaucracy – the obsolete administrative systems are not willing and cannot develop and incorporate effective administrative tools for inter-departmental or inter-institutional collaboration

Lack of Established Research Collaboration Hubs and Platforms – scientist looking for new collaboration leads for their projects have no established places and organizations to turn into

Scientist Isolationist and Traditionalist Education Backgrounds – this is the way most scientists were prepared and programmed for their work, for many it is hard to get out of the scheme without working infrastructure and guidance around

Dissemination and Publishing Complications – in collaborative work without implemented rules and regulations there are frequent issues of defining the research findings ownership and publishing rights

To address the inefficiencies in today’s research collaboration we at the Research Stir aim to form an innovative hub and web based platform that would promote scientific research openness and multi lab collaboration for the social purpose of expanding the scientific research scope and advancing the research output to find answers to the challenging scientific questions the world is facing today. Please join us in reaching that goal.

Scientific research suffers due to faulty research publishing systems

There are two major obstacles in the current scientific publishing that scientists meet on their way to have their research findings published:

1. Acceptance of the submitted manuscript by the journal editors – based solely on the editors opinion of the manuscript value for the journal. Simply put, it depends mainly on their caprice of the manuscript being for them  interesting enough to be published in the journal.

2. The peer review process, which follows when the journal editors decide to accept the manuscript for review and possible publication. The peer review process is based on the judgment of two to four reviewers chosen by the editors. Negative opinion of even a single reviewer most frequently decides that the manuscript is rejected.

The entire process to have a scientific manuscript published involves just few people and takes several month (or more if additional experiments are requested by reviewers) to finish. In case the manuscript is rejected the entire game starts all over, usually by approaching another journal of choice.

A former British Medical Journal editor Richard Smith correctly noted that the current peer review scientific publishing system is:

-    costly, in terms of time and money

-    random,  the correlation in perceived suitability of manuscript for publication between two (frequently biased) groups of reviewers is little better than zero

-    ineffective at detecting errors,

-    biased towards established groups and against originality,

-    frequently abused, reviewers can steal ideas from papers they review or block the publication of competitors

Another problem in scientific publishing today is the fact that academic publishers have become the enemies of science. The recent initiative: Research Works Act may clearly indicate that publishers of scientific journals are trying to block open access publishing to keep their pockets full by locking publicly funded research behind their pay-walls. With wide spread internet access to scientific publications the obsolete system of printed journals has only one goal today - it is to sustain the publishing corporations income. The printing process is a huge waste of  natural resources and it delivers an obsolete product that either goes directly to trash (recycling at best) or piles up research offices, never being used in an era and convenience of online journal access.

Additionally, the printing process delays the accepted manuscripts publication by another several month to over a year beyond the peer review process. This is particularly true for the most popular journals where the number of accepted articles often outnumbers the space for printing.

To address these and other scientific publishing inefficiencies the Research Stir E-Journal is based on innovative review and publishing approach with low cost, fast publishing cycle and convenience for  scientists in mind, and with open access to public. We are also breaking the feudal system where:

-    publishers with their minimal work input own the copyright to articles submitted by hard working scientists, and handsomely cash on selling copies to libraries and individuals at monopolistic costs,

-    publishers retard scientific progress in the process of protecting their unsustainable business model.