Article on Peer Review

I read an interesting article in The Scientist on how the NIH wants to evaluate the peer-review process for NIH grant applications.

Some facts about NIH grants:

• Average age a researcher gets his/her first R01 grant: 42 (as I've mentioned in a recent post).
• Time between grant submission and grant acceptance: average of 9 months.
• Percent of R01 grants that go to new investigators: 6%.

This article is a partial follow up of a commentary (also published in The Scientist) by David Kaplan of Case Western on the peer review process in general. If you've had bad experiences with the whole review process, you'll applaud Kaplan.