Nature March 8, 2024 At its annual meeting this week, China’s legislative body, the National People’s Congress, promised to increase government funding for science by 10% in 2024. It’s the largest boost to funding in five years. The increase comes as the Chinese economy struggles to meet growth targets and is locked in a race for technological supremacy with the United States. “To win this game, China has to invest in science and technology, especially in basic research,” says Marina Zhang, who studies innovation with a focus on China… read more.
Category Archives: S&T funding
Reward research for being useful — not just flashy
Nature October 4, 2022 According to the author who oversaw basic research programs across the US Department of Defense, and other organizations, too many countries have built a research pipeline that venerates prizes and papers above all else. People and their problems get left out as scientists chase novelty and the prestige it brings. Too often the more applied a proposal is, the less likely it is to be funded. Even research funds intended for applied work reward novelty over utility. Long-term support for science might depend on scientists helping to solve local problems, such as the regional flooding, fires […]
NIH issues a seismic mandate: share data publicly
Nature February 16, 2022 In January 2023, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will begin requiring most of the 300,000 researchers and 2,500 institutions it funds annually to include a data-management plan in their grant applications — and to eventually make their data publicly available. Under the new policy, which will go into effect on 25 January, all NIH grant applications for projects that collect scientific data must include a ‘data management and sharing’ (DMS) plan that contains details about the software or tools needed to analyse the data, when and where the raw data will be published and […]
Widening political rift in U.S. may threaten science, medicine
Science Daily March 22, 2021 According to a team of researchers in the US (Washington University, Stanford University), in the United States, the wide ideological divergence in public confidence in science poses a potentially significant problem for the scientific enterprise. They examined the behavioral consequences of this ideological divide for Americans’ contributions to medical research. Based on a mass survey of American adults, they found that engagement in a wide range of medical research activities is a function of a latent propensity to participate. The propensity is systematically higher among liberals than among conservatives. A substantial part of this ideological […]