Who Gets a Seat at the National Science Funding Priorities Table?
Revisions to the NSF's Merit Review Criteria Could Use More Public Engagement
SOURCE: CBS News and the National Science Foundation
An artistic depiction of neutrinos traveling from the sun towards the earth. The NSF helped fund an underground telescope at the south pole to detect the nearly massless subatomic particles.
On Thursday the comment window will close on the National Science Foundation’s proposed revisions to its merit review criteria. While Frodeman and Holbrook expressed concerns about how the proposed changes address the tension between public accountability and research freedom, the process behind this review raises another concern worth attention.
Where does the public fit into the NSF mission? Besides being a beneficiary (directly or indirectly) of the output of NSF research dollars, what voice does the public have in determining what the NSF supports? What voice should it have?
It’s not clear that the NSF gave much consideration to these questions when soliciting input on revising the merit review criteria. The request for input referenced above was not posted in the Federal Register, where most proposed rules and regulations are posted for public comment, but just on the NSF website (and not in the News section). The description of the process in that request mentions reaching out to a wide variety of stakeholders inside and outside of NSF, but the public isn’t mentioned until the “about the NSF” paragraph near the end of the notice. An earlier notice requesting input was also not in the Federal Register and took the form of a “Dear Colleague” letter typically used for researchers in NSF-sponsored communities. Perhaps most critical, the Charge and Work Plan for the Merit Review Task Force doesn’t include contact with the public. Now, it is possible that there has been a lot of public input into this process that just isn’t publicized by NSF. But given the recent additional scrutiny of NSF research, it is hard to see what public input to NSF processes would not be publicized.
How might NSF solicit and use more public input in its mission to “maintain and strengthen the vitality of the U.S. science and engineering enterprise and to ensure that Americans benefit fully from the products of the science, engineering and education activities that NSF supports”? The YouCut program, where citizens were encouraged to review the NSF grants database for entries that seemed to be wasteful or frivolous, was problematic at best. People were asked to judge the merits of a grant based strictly on the abstract available online. Now, if the public has insight about fraudulent and wasteful research, it should certainly notify the NSF inspector general. But seeking general input from the public after grants are awarded seems best suited for crowd-sourced finger-pointing rather than assessing what areas of research the public thinks might best benefit them overall.
But that doesn’t mean the public cannot contribute to the discussion of what research should be funded moving forward. NSF merit review has two main criteria: the intellectual merit of a proposal (Is it a scientifically important, well-thought-out proposal?) and the broader impacts of the proposal (What effects could this research project have on other societal goals or societal goods?). It would be logistically difficult to have the public sit on review panels where intellectual merit is judged as most of the public would lack the background to judge the intellectual merit of scientific proposals.
The vast survey apparatus of NSF, however, could be used to gauge public opinion on what broader impacts should mean for scientific research. Such public outreach wouldn’t be the sole determinant—congressional input had a major influence this time around and will in the future—and it could serve other purposes besides defining “broader impacts.” A necessary companion to this survey work ought to be a broader communication of what NSF does and the broader outcomes (not just direct outputs) of the research it supports. NSF seems perfectly capable of explaining the value of research output, or the specific relevant problems that funded research seeks to address. That it does this usually after someone pokes fun at a research grant reflects a reactive rather than a proactive approach to the public. This is, unfortunately, consistent with the benign neglect of public input observed in the merit review revision process.
With the soon-to-close comment period, there is still an opportunity to encourage NSF to engage with the public in revising its merit review criteria. And while many would not consider NSF to be a mission agency, it still serves the public, and should engage that public more than it does.
David Bruggeman is the Policy Analyst for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and blogs about science policy at Pasco Phronesis. The views here are his alone and do not represent the views of the ACM.
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