AIP Takes Action on Bill Requiring Disclosure of Proposals and Peer Reviewers

“Granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), receive proposals in confidence and protect the often proprietary nature of their contents. Reviewers are obligated to maintain the confidentiality of the proposal being reviewed and the review itself. Requiring a complete copy of a funded grant proposal to be available on a public website would seriously limit the ability of grant recipients to reap benefits from their own research. A proposal can contain intellectual property of the researcher and the institution that employs the researcher. The ideas and directions of research outlined are, in most cases, based on years of work. These ideas can also be the basis for other research performed by the proposer, including research that may not be funded by the federal government.”

“The first – which would require an agency to publicly post in its entirety every application it has acted upon favorably within 15 days after it has notified the recipient – could compromise any unpublished intellectual property contained in the proposal, robbing the recipient of possible scientific and entrepreneurial benefit

“The second – which would require the public posting of the ‘name, title, and employer of each individual who served as a peer reviewer for the grant program concerned, during the six-month period preceding the award of the grant’ – would severely inhibit peer review if the name of the reviewer and a given grant are clearly linked. The science community from time to time has examined the virtue of removing anonymity from the peer-review procedure and has consistently concluded that revealing names of reviewers would cripple the process. Without anonymity, many researchers will not agree to review proposals at all, or should they agree to do so, they would be much less candid or openly critical of any proposed research, greatly compromising the utility of the peer-review practice.”

“Posting grant applications will jeopardize researchers’ patent opportunities thereby reducing incentives for technology transfer. Additionally, the public posting of U.S. researchers’ ideas would enable competitors (including foreign scientists and industries) to steal cutting-edge American intellectual property – eroding our ability to stay at the forefront in critical scientific and engineering fields and of commercial production.”

“We also oppose disclosure of peer reviewers, either by name or unique identifier. As written, the provision would allow identification of peer reviewers at the individual grant level in areas of research in which there are small numbers of scientists and engineers. An important characteristic of the current peer-review process is the anonymity of the reviewers. This process has helped to foster many seminal discoveries throughout all science, engineering, and mathematics disciplines and has contributed to the development of a significant cadre of first rate researchers in all disciplines. The success of the peer-review process depends on the willingness of qualified reviewers to be candid and critical as needed in the evaluation of research proposals and, in fact, without the anonymity provided in the current process, many researchers would not be willing to review proposals.”