Grants—are they contracts?

Grants—are they contracts?

I’m not here to talk about whether we should have more funding. Instead, I’m going to discuss the process of the academic grant application and review. I’d like to reach a broad community with information of how the system works. The details are for USA and Canada but the concepts are pretty similar world wide.

So, you have an idea. Write it down. Make some aims. Talk to people about the relevance. If you still think it is a good idea, you go to the grant phase.

In Canada, the main medical agency is the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the engineering one is the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council. Last year, the average NSERC grant was about 34K. I’m not sure about CIHR as the distribution has a large median around 125- 150K with a few much larger grants. Canadian grants don’t have faculty salaries but can have a salary for a post-doc or student.

In the USA, the main agencies are the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The NIH grants pretty much start at 250K and have a lot of academic salary. When you remove the academic salary, the grants are often in the 100-150K range. Scientists and faculty who are paid off of grants are said to be on soft money. You can be tenured, and be on soft money—even the principle investigator of the grant (PI). Thus, there is a lot of pressure, both from an academic and family perspective, to stay funded.

Grants used to be for about 5 years. Many still are but even more are in the 2-4 year range. That sounds ok, except for a few unfortunate facts. It can take 6 month or more to get data and write a good grant. It can take 5-8 months for the grant to be reviewed. Most grants are not funded on the first rounds so you need to re-write and re-submit. From idea to funding is often 2 or more years (ok, most ideas don’t get funded anymore).

What is in a grant? There is the science. In a CIHR grant, that is usually 11 pages not including figures or references. In NIH it varies. An RO1 is 12 pages including figures and in NSERC is 5 pages including figures. The full grant though can be over 100 pages. So there is a lot of information in addition to whether it is good science that can cause a grant to get a bad score. This includes budget numbers and justification, ethics protocols and approvals, biosketches etc.

One of the most interesting aspects in my mind is the budget. You can spend a lot of time creating an accurate budget—but the final budget doesn’t really mean much once the grant is funded. By the way, this is a good thing. I don’t support saying we should keep to the budget, I’m saying we should only have to produce enough data to justify the total. NIH figured this out years ago and offered the modular budget where you estimate it within 25K but you don’t put in much detail. Alberta is going the other way, assessing your semiannual spending and discussing your actual progress.

A second interesting part about grants is the specific goals themselves—the aims. These are the core of the grant. Again, however, once the grant is funded these often become guidelines. We as scientists know this. I put it out there that if, 3-5 years after starting a grant, you still want to do the same aims you started with, then you are not too innovative. The research has to be flexible to take into account the many ongoing discoveries from your lab and from others. This comment is not true, to clarify, for some types translational grants where a device is being built or a clinical trial performed. It is very true for the more basic science type of grants.

So, the budget can change and the aims can change. This may be one of the little secrets of holding a grant that isn’t widely understood. Some believe it is a serious flaw on the investigators part of they don’t do what they set out to do. I believe researchers should have significant flexibility to do what they deem important at the time, to maintain research productivity--- as long as it fits within the mandate of the original proposal.

This gets a bit sticky during the renewal when the reviewers are asked to comment on the productivity. Is it overall, or is it with respect to the original aims. I am always very flexible on this—looking for good science.

So, is a grant a license to do science, or is a contract with the agency to do what you outlined in your aims? I put it to you that we should strive to keep the grant concept. Some agencies are pushing hard to make the research into a contract. This will greatly stifle innovation. If, from idea to completion of the grant, there can be 5-8 years of time pass, then all the ideas you had in the middle of that time will be lost.