"Under “binning” proposal, applications’ numerical ratings would no longer be used for final funding decisions"
"The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) wants to change a key step in the review process determining which research it funds, raising concerns about transparency and political interference. Currently, peer reviewers from outside the agency give each grant application a numerical quality score, and applicants receive these ratings and detailed review comments as feedback. But now the NIH scientific review arm would lump the composite of a grant’s scores into three piles—top, middle, and bottom—and give that rating, as well as the critiques, to applicants and staff at the relevant NIH institute. The institute would then use multiple factors to decide which proposals to fund—and applicants would never receive their specific scores.
The new process, NIH asserts in a notice posted on 14 August, would result in “elevating the role of scientific peer review” because staff making grant decisions would have to rely more on the comments made by reviewers rather than overemphasizing the numerical scores as a perhaps unreliable proxy for quality. Many other science agencies in the United States, including the National Science Foundation, and abroad use a similar approach, often referred to as “binning.” And the concept fits with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya’s Unified Funding Strategy, which requires institutes to stop using “paylines” or strict funding cutoffs based on scores and instead consider other factors, such as an institute’s priorities and the applicant’s career stage, the notice states.
But coming amid a host of other shake-ups to science under President Donald Trump’s administration, the plan to keep scores secret from everyone except peer-review staff is stirring concern that the move may lead grantmaking decisions too far from consideration of scientific merit. “This would have disastrous consequences for American science,” says Ferric Fang, a microbiologist at the University of Washington who has analyzed NIH’s peer-review process."
