Effective or predatory funding? Evaluating the hidden costs of grant applications.

Only if the total grant sum considerably exceeds the costs of the distribution, that is, producing and evaluating grant proposals plus administrative overheads, does the grant actually support research; otherwise it effectively impedes it. Keywords: Funding; grants; metascience; science management; science policy EN Funding grants metascience science management science policy 104 111 8 02/06/23 20230201 NES 230201 Researchers are spending an increasing fraction of their time on applying for funding; however, the current funding system has considerable deficiencies in reliably evaluating the merit of research proposals, despite extensive efforts on the sides of applicants, grant reviewers and decision committees. Therefore, even for such a large grant, the cost of proposal writing exceeds 10% of the total funding - in addition to the costs for the evaluation and administration related to the funding distribution. The smaller the grant sum and the funding rate, the faster one reaches a negative net return: the cost of the principal investigator's time invested in the proposal exceeds the grant sum. [Extracted from the article]