Research funding: expensive, inefficient and hardly understandable!

Research funding: expensive, inefficient and hardly understandable!

The global support for scientific research has a devastating judgment from experts: the conventional financing systems are "often expensive, time -consuming and imprecise". This applies in particular to researchers in managerial positions that spend more time with the acquisition and management of funds than with actual research. According to a study, these scientists spend an average of 45 percent of their time with administrative tasks. The authors of a current study, led by Professor Schweiger from the Technical University of Vienna, are raising this knowledge, which is characterized by numerous factors such as non -transparency and bias. In practice, this means that up to 50 percent of the funding must be spent on the creation of applications-a circumstance that seems extremely questionable for taxpayers, such as dfg.de

positive approaches in funding practice

In Austria there are already examples of new evaluation methods, such as the "1000-ideas program" of the Science Fund (FWF). The selection is made by an anonymized and random procedure based on international reports. This ensures that the best projects are really promoted without the applicants being stuck in the endless administrative process. These approaches show that there are many brilliant ideas that need immediate attention and scientific evaluation to reduce the constant pressure on the researchers and at the same time increase the quality of the research projects.