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.

How to choose a journal—or how to avoid being scammed

How to choose a journal—or how to avoid being scammed

Your publications are your product. The idea is that once they are published, the information will be available forever. The ease of access changes with whether they are open access or not, but either way there are methods for everyone to get a copy.

Life was pretty easy in terms of choosing a journal before the internet. Not as many choices.

But now. Sheesh. Everyone and their neighbor is trying to publish a science journal. Why…because they can make megabucks!

The number of new journals that show up advertising in my inbox is staggering. As a result, I have a specific list of criteria that the journal has to meet before I send in a paper.

1) pubmed listed (ok, we made a mistake once but if anyone wants a copy let me know)

I might consider breaking this rule if it is a new journal published by someone I know who has a good reason for starting a new journal.

2) linked to a society. This is a great way of filtering out the chaff but you still have to see if the society has been around. In your field, you will know which ones are solid.

3) published by a major publishing house that has been around for a long time.

4) have already published many articles in the field of the paper you are submitting. Look in your reference list. What journal did you cite the most?

This will eliminate the scammers and they are pretty simple rules to follow.

But, open access or not?

PLoS biology and PLoS medicine cost $2900 per article. Enough said. If I publish 5 papers open access a year, that’s about $15,000. That just isn’t happening. It is ½ of my NSERC grant. Are you kidding! Every author who wants to publish open access struggles with this problem.

On the plus side, some universities have open access publication support. Good luck. I would like to publish everything in open access but I can’t due to cost. Our university just announced that the publication support is available if you don’t have a grant. So that eliminates me. They also won’t support partial open access where the paper could be published without cost.

The benefit of the wildcat open access journals, as I’m sure you’ve seen in the news, is that it is easier to publish there. This is not the case for respectable journals. OK, there may be mistakes due to reviewer overload or a poor editor, but on the whole the papers that get published are better than the ones submitted because of the feedback by good reviewers. I’m sure everyone has horror stories of reviewers but it’s better to publish in a respected journal (not necessarily high impact factor) than a journal that doesn’t care about the quality. Go for quality.

There are a few reasons why.

1) open access is currently all online. Who supports the website? If the journal goes under or decides not to support the site then your paper is gone…GONE.. FOREVER. At least with paper copies one could always find a library with the article. So from a longevity perspective, open access/online is more risky than paper.

2) most of the open access online journals are scams. They want to publish because they want to make megabucks.  Use my criteria above.

I realize that even good publishing houses are making a lot on these online/open access publications. We as a scientific group need to start pushing back more. 

Good luck, go with respected journals.

Concussion update

Concussion update

Albert Ski Cross training, high performance sport sees many concussions

When my boys were in the age 11-12 ski racing program, I became acutely aware of concussion and the problems it can cause. I was a brain imaging person so it was easy for me to delve into the literature to see what was known. There 6605 papers in pubmed today with the keyword concussion. If you studied 2 papers a day, it would take you 9 years to read this. Yet we don’t know what the link is between symptoms and injury in the brain, and we don’t know how best to detect the injury. Right now, the diagnosis is largely based on questions to the patient. Increasingly, things like reaction times, indices of balance, motor skills are being measured.

So, I asked two exceptional people to help with a public forum on concussion. We ran this forum 3 times at Canada Olympic park, over the past 4 years.

Dr. Karen Barlow is an Associate Professor of Pediatric Neurology at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute for Child and Maternal Health. She is a specialist in concussion and traumatic brain injury. Dr. Kelly Brett is a sports medicine physician at the University of Calgary Sports Medicine clinic and is the Head physician for the Calgary Flames hockey team.

There has been A LOT of interest in concussion. I think there are 3 main questions: What is concussion, how do you prevent it, and how do you cure it?

Concussion is currently defined by the symptoms. There are forms that you can use such as the standard concussion assessment tool (SCAT2 or 3) etC.

Guskiewicz KM, Register-Mihalik J, McCrory P, McCrea M, Johnston K, Makdissi M, Dvorak J, Davis G, and Meeuwisse W. 2013. Evidence-based approach to revising the SCAT2: introducing the SCAT3. Br J Sports Med 47: 289-293.

 The biological link, or the precise damage that occurs in the brain that causes these symptoms, just isn’t known.

One can make an educated guess.  “Ringing your bell” could break the fine connections that transfer information in the brain. These connections, (the synapses) as well as the wires (the axons), are very fragile. The barrier between the blood and the tissue of the brain, the “blood-brain barrier” is also fragile. The barrier is partly physical, in that there are collections of cells that form a wall between the blood and the brain. The barrier is also “regulatory”, in that transport processes in these barrier cells determine what crosses into the brain or returns to the blood. There can be disruption to either, or both, of the physical and regulatory components of the BBB. Such disruption can cause chemicals to cross into the brain that can damage cells and can cause the brain to swell. There may be metabolic disruption. The energy factory in the cell, the mitochondria, may be damaged in some way.

Headache, nausea, and not feeling quite right are just some of the symptoms. Even “not feeling quite right” should be taken seriously. Keep in mind the headache only comes from the surface of the brain. There are no pain sensors in the brain. Only from surface layer, largely in the membrane called the meninges, do you receive pain signals. So—you can easily see that damage can occur in the brain with no associated pain (or headache).

It’s easy to say you can prevent concussion by removing head hits from sport, but in reality head hits are not the only problem. Your head can get shaken up badly with a hit to the chest or a fall. The head has to move violently to have the brain shaken up. A sharp rap to the head may not cause a concussion due to the resistance in your fluid filled brain box (the skull) that prevents a very sharp knock from moving the brain. Hits or falls which cause large movements of the whole head are usually more serious.

So, we don’t know what it is and we can’t prevent them. We can reduce them through training and good helmets but a good helmet won’t eliminate concussions either—sorry. Even with a helmet you can shake your brain. We are left with making sure we recognize concussion and that one works hard to minimize the long term damage.

What can be said is that the first hours may be associated with more life threatening problems like bleeding on the brain. It is very important that the subject be properly evaluated. Depending on the symptoms, you may or may not have CT or MRI to look for complications. These imaging methods are used to rule out more severe problems. There is no imaging method currently available that can be used to diagnose concussion itself. MRI holds promise. I’m an MRI researcher so I’m hoping for a home run here.

I’m also a researcher into studying brain activity with optical (light) imaging. We just published a paper detecting changes in brain communication using fNIRS.

Urban KJ, Barlow K, Goodyear BG, Jimenez JJ, and Dunn JF. Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Reveals Reduced Inter-hemispheric Cortical Communication Following Pediatric Concussion. 2014 J Neurotrauma.epub

It is critical to keep the person quiet. The first 3 days, the person is symptom free, then you can consider doing some exercise.

Brown NJ, Mannix RC, O'Brien MJ, Gostine D, Collins MW, and Meehan WP, 3rd. 2014. Effect of cognitive activity level on duration of post-concussion symptoms. Pediatrics 133: e299-304.

In the old days, two weeks off was considered enough. Now it is understood that each person is an individual and each concussion is unique. There are no generalizations on how long it will take to return to play. Watch symptoms. Do some exercise to elevate the heart rate (say to 120). if there are no symptoms, then over the next days gradually increase the exercise. If symptoms occur, back off to the point where there were no symptoms and starts again. If you have had a bad concussion, having medical advice during this phase would be important.

There are advantages to taking concussion seriously. If you “aren’t feeling quite right” and try to throw yourself down a super-G course at 110kph, the results may not be pretty. In other words, your coordination may not be perfect and so you have an increased risk of falling and getting another concussion. A second more obvious reason is that if the damage isn’t healed, you may make it worse.

Dr. Barlow noted that most kids get better pretty rapidly, and have no long term symptoms. Dr. Brett noted that if the symptoms aren’t getting better, make sure you have your neck examined. Upper neck injuries can cause the same symptoms as concussion.

Barlow KM, Crawford S, Stevenson A, Sandhu SS, Belanger F, and Dewey D. 2010. Epidemiology of postconcussion syndrome in pediatric mild traumatic brain injury. Pediatrics 126: e374-381.

There is great information on the Ontario neurotrauma website

http://onf.org/documents/guidelines-for-pediatric-concussion

One of my goals as a medical researcher is to improve the diagnosis and monitoring of concussion patients. I hope that someday soon, there will be more specific answers to some of the three main questions.