This week, Nature has an article written from a rather exceptional perspective: inside the deliberations that go on when grants are given out to researchers. In this case, in return for keeping the proceedings anonymous, the American Cancer Society allowed a Nature reporter access to the deliberations of a panel of expert reviewers (called a study section) that determines which grants get funded. As with many government granting agencies, the ACS has been receiving far more grants to review in recent years, meaning that the percentage of grants funded has dropped considerably. The report provides a window into a key step of the scientific process that the public rarely gets to see; fortunately, the journal has made it open access.

Over the last decade, the ACS has had to deal with a largely static budget, meaning that the number of grants that are distributed has been relatively constant, even as the cost of running a lab has gone up and a continuous flow of researchers has entered the field. Although the ACS is a private charity, the tensions it faces are fairly widespread. With the exception of stimulus funding, most government science agencies have faced budgets that have roughly kept pace with inflation, at best. The net result of all of this is that the percentage of grants that are submitted has declined significantly over the past decade, which has made the competition for funding fierce.

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Read the original, in all its glory, right here:
Tight budgets mean hard choices for science funding