8 posts were merged into an existing topic: Harvard Medical School faces grim financial future
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Citing N.I.H. Cuts, a Top Science Journal Stops Accepting Submissions
Environmental Health Perspectives, widely considered the premier environmental health journal, has announced that it would pause acceptance of new studies for publication, as federal cuts have left its future uncertain.
For more than 50 years, the journal has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to review studies on the health effects of environmental toxins — from “forever chemicals” to air pollution — and publish the research free of charge.
The editors made the decision to halt acceptance of studies because of a “lack of confidence” that contracts for critical expenses like copy-editing and editorial software would be renewed after their impending expiration dates, said Joel Kaufman, the journal’s top editor.
He declined to comment on the publication’s future prospects.
EHS is one of the few true “open access” science journals in existence today. It does not charge anyone to read its articles. (IOW, does not require subscription to read its journal.) Additionally, EHS does not charge researchers to publish their article, unlike other open access journals which may charge authors thousands of dollars to publish their work.
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Insanity.
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Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” according to an email seen by Nature .
The funding halt applies to both existing grants and future research proposals.
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As a STEM professor married to a STEM professor, all I can say is Oh F***
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yeah, same. I’m also chair of my department which makes this even more fun to deal with…
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So… I texted that article to my spouse who was already asleep last night. This morning we realized that it helped make sense of something that happened yesterday.
Spouse’s colleague / collaborator (they currently have federal grants together) was super bummed yesterday. The colleague said that their NSF grant review had just come back and it was baffling. They had applied to renew their funding for an existing project. They’d just gotten notice their grant was rejected and the reviewer remarks were very weird. She said they appeared to have been entirely AI generated. The email made no sense, and the detailed scientific review was full of words that were ostensibly relevant but were assembled in a way that was total nonsense.
These people have decades of experience in reading grant reviews, both positive and critical, and have seen nothing like it. Even reviews trashing your grant are always at least intelligible and clearly from a human brain. Oh, also, she tried contacting their program officer at the NSF and they appear to have been fired. And then proceeded to drink a lot of wine at a dinner last night. So a lightbulb went off in my spouse’s head after reading that article this morning. F***!!!
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oof. interesting.
I recently (like this week) got an NSF rejected. I often don’t feel up to looking at the reviews right away when that happens, so I haven’t yet. Wonder what I will find when I do!
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I’m sorry about the rejection, that always stings. Will be interested to see if your reviews are “normal”.
In this case, the proposal was very clearly an environmental remediation project. I can imagine that easily falls into the category of things that some people calling the shots no longer want to fund, even though it’s been funded so far. We wonder if that has something to do with it.
I just got some NIH scores back (rejected) but don’t have the summary statements yet. It was supposed to be reviewed in January but got delayed to April. My friend who serves on that study section said it was a s***show and quite unusual, but I’m expecting the reviews to be normal.
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In the above article, there is a link to Grant Watch to be a more comprehensive compilation of cancelled NIH and NSF grants.
Edited to add link to Grant Watch: https://grant-watch.us/
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The National Institutes of Health will no longer allow American scientists to direct its funding to research partners overseas, casting doubt on the future of studies on subjects including malaria and childhood cancer.
Researchers funded by N.I.H. grants have historically used subawards to facilitate international collaborations, which are essential for studying conditions like childhood cancer or illnesses like malaria and tuberculosis that are not prevalent in the United States.
“Competitive science requires a team approach,” said Dr. E. Anders Kolb, chief executive of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. “There’s no one lab or institution or investigator that has all of the tools necessary to solve the very complex questions that we’re asking.”
Many of these studies require a large number of subjects. For example, as scientists are able to define types of childhood cancers more precisely, Dr. Kolb said, “you get into increasingly smaller and smaller subsets of disease.”
“So if you want to run a clinical trial of a new therapy that may benefit those children, it could take decades to complete a trial if you only enroll children in the U.S.,” he added. “When we collaborate with our international partners, we can finish these trials much more quickly and get the therapies to children as soon as possible.”
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More like… it will probably kill one of my existing NIH grants on opioids. Do you think that’s an important topic? I have a collaborator who performs analytical miracles. It’s not that easy to find a neurophysiologist who is also an absolute wizard with cluster analysis of massive amounts of electrophysiological data. He just happens to be French.
There are already stringent rules in place to prevent undue foreign influence in federally funded research. In fact, I just repeated my yearly mandatory training on that exact topic.
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You are dealing with real science, and you are used to working in an environment in which scientific knowledge is a prerequisite for making decisions regarding funding. The grants are being cancelled based on not-science. It will never make sense, unfortunately.
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Please review the updated guidelines for posting about political topics in the open forums. Namely, it is okay to discuss factual information and the impacts of policies, but it is not okay to speculate about potential or possible changes outside of the politics forum. Thank you for your understanding.
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Sharing this gift article, due to the impact on student research opportunities as a consequence of recent policy changes:
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