The massive science funding shift that researchers are proposing won’t fundamentally change who or what research is funded so much as it will require fewer resources as described in a Jan. 8, 2014 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

Researchers in the United States have suggested an alternative way to allocate science funding. The method, which is described in EMBO reports (“From funding agencies to scientific agency”), depends on a collective distribution of funding by the scientific community, requires only a fraction of the costs associated with the traditional peer review of grant proposals and, according to the authors, may yield comparable or even better results.

The Jan. 8, 2014 EMBO [European Molecular Biology Organization] news release, which originated the news item, quotes the lead author’s perspective on the current funding systems and describes the proposed solution which is meant for all science funding,

“Peer review of scientific proposals and grants has served science very well for decades. However, there is a strong sense in the scientific community that things could be improved,” said Johan Bollen, professor and lead author of the study from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. “Our most productive researchers invest an increasing amount of time, energy, and effort into writing and reviewing research proposals, most of which do not get funded. That time could be spent performing the proposed research in the first place.” He added: “Our proposal does not just save time and money but also encourages innovation.”

The new approach is possible due to recent advances in mathematics and  computer technologies. The system involves giving all scientists an annual, unconditional fixed amount of funding to conduct their research. All funded scientists are, however, obliged to donate a fixed percentage of all of the funding that they previously received to other researchers. As a result, the funding circulates through the community, converging on researchers that are expected to make the best use of it. “Our alternative funding system is inspired by the mathematical models used to search the internet for relevant information,” said Bollen. “The decentralized funding model uses the wisdom of the entire scientific community to determine a fair distribution of funding.”

The authors believe that this system can lead to sophisticated behavior at a global level. It would certainly liberate researchers from the time-consuming process of submitting and reviewing project proposals, but could also reduce the uncertainty associated with funding cycles, give researchers much greater flexibility, and allow the community to fund risky but high-reward projects that existing funding systems may overlook.

“You could think of it as a Google-inspired crowd-funding system that encourages all researchers to make autonomous, individual funding decisions towards people, not projects or proposals,” said Bollen. “All you need is a centralized web site where researchers could log-in, enter the names of the scientists they chose to donate to, and specify how much they each should receive.”

The authors emphasize that the system would require oversight to prevent misuse, such as conflicts of interests and collusion. Funding agencies may need to confidentially monitor the flow of funding and may even play a role in directing it. For example they can provide incentives to donate to specific large-scale research challenges that are deemed priorities but which the scientific community can overlook.

“The savings of financial and human resources could be used to identify new targets of funding, to support the translation of scientific results into products and jobs, and to help communicate advances in science and technology,” added Bollen. “This funding system may even have the side-effect of changing publication practices for the better: researchers will want to clearly communicate their vision and research goals to as wide an audience as possible.”

While the research is US-centric, it’s easy to see its applicabllity in many, if not all, jurisdictions around the world.

I have two links and two citations. The first is for the EMBO Reports paper,

From funding agencies to scientific agency; Collective allocation of science funding as an alternative to peer review by  Johan Bollen, David Crandall, Damion Junk, Ying Ding, & Katy Börner. Article first published online: 7 JAN 2014 DOI: 10.1002/embr.201338068

© 2014 The Authors

This paper is behind a paywall.

The second link and citation is for an earlier version of the paper on arXiv.org, which is an open access archive,

Collective allocation of science funding: from funding agencies to scientific agency
by Johan Bollen, David Crandall, Damion Junk, Ying Ding, & Katy Boerner.
(Submitted on 3 Apr 2013)

Here’s the abstract from the April 2013 version of the paper on arXiv.org,

Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens of billions of dollars in annual science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible to best promote scientific innovation and productivity? The present system relies primarily on peer review of project proposals. In 2010 alone, NSF convened more than 15,000 scientists to review 55,542 proposals. [emphasis mine] Although considered the scientific gold standard, peer review requires significant overhead costs, and may be subject to biases, inconsistencies, and oversights. We investigate a class of funding models in which all participants receive an equal portion of yearly funding, but are then required to anonymously donate a fraction of their funding to peers. The funding thus flows from one participant to the next, each acting as if he or she were a funding agency themselves. Here we show through a simulation conducted over large-scale citation data (37M articles, 770M citations) that such a distributed system for science may yield funding patterns similar to existing NIH and NSF distributions, but may do so at much lower overhead while exhibiting a range of other desirable features. Self-correcting mechanisms in scientific peer evaluation can yield an efficient and fair distribution of funding. The proposed model can be applied in many situations in which top-down or bottom-up allocation of public resources is either impractical or undesirable, e.g. public investments, distribution chains, and shared resource management.

It’s interesting to note the agencies which supported the research (from the news release),

Awards from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Institutes of Health supported the work.

It would seem there’s an appetite for change given the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are the two largest science funding agencies in the US.