Sustainable Research Funding Analysis

While we wait for the Grants.gov Adobe day web cast later today, I wanted to point to a couple of compelling articles and analysis about the long term effects of rapid growth in funding, using NIH as the example. The analysis was brought to my attention (thanks emptypockets) here.

It is foolish policy to pour resources into something for five years, and then starve it for five years. You not only waste the potential growth of the second five years, but you waste a good deal of your investment the first five years as well. Much of the funding that was poured into the NIH between 1998 and 2003 will be a loss as those research projects are put in the freezer and those young scientist trainees leave science.

Sure explains a lot of the stress in research institutions in general and research administration specifically.

I was reminded about something that is fundamentally obvious to research administrators, that funding is essentially about a sustainable workforce. And sustainability is measured in decades due to the nature of academic research endeavors.

The original source material for this analysis is available in a Science magazine article.  Significant analytics on the effects of policy funding on research science were delivered in this study by Georgia State University economist Paula Stephan. If you were ever looking for documentation to talk to policymakers, this is it.

We should get Paula to address this issue at some national meetings, specifically the FDP.