Past and Future of Research Funding: From Beginnings to New Developments

Finn Luebber, Universität Lübeck, Germany

About the seminar

Institutionally organised research funding is a rather new development that has its roots in the beginnings of the last century. A marked increase in funding during and after World War II in the US led to an era of increased research productivity and popularized project-based peer-reviewed research funding. This way of funding distribution eventually spread to all Western funding systems, although at varying time points and to varying degrees. Today, there is an increasing amount of criticism of this system, especially due to deficiencies in fairness, high direct and indirect costs, and questionable validity. Alongside incremental suggestions to improve this process, the critique also stimulated the development of new approaches, of which lottery elements are one of the most discussed. While the outright random distribution of funding is viewed with skepticism, tiebreaker lotteries for random allocation among proposals pre-selected through peer review have been welcomed more positively.

In a recent article our group proposed a third way: A lottery-first approach, in which a lottery determines who is eligible to submit a full proposal. In the talk, I will present the approach theoretically and present empirical data around fairness, costs, and satisfaction.

Finally, I considered why, despite these criticisms and emerging alternatives, the funding system remains resistant to change, and which functions beyond selecting proposals on epistemic merit may help explain this persistence.

About the speaker

Finn is a PhD candidate at the University of Lübeck in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy where he currently performs theoretical and empirical research about the lottery-first approach to funding. His wider research interests include theory development, causal inference, and measurement error. Having backgrounds in both psychology and molecular life science, he tries to understand the inner workings of academia and organized research production from multiple angles.