Endocrine Insider
August 1, 2007

Society President Margaret Shupnik, PhD, attended a July 30 meeting of leaders in the scientific community to discuss the process of peer review at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is examining its system of peer review in an effort to streamline operations and make the process more effective. As part of this endeavor, the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director (ACD) has formed a Peer Review Working Group (PRWG)—co-chaired by Society member Keith Yamamoto, PhD, and Lawrence Tabak, PhD—to engage the scientific community and make recommendations to the ACD. As an initial step, the PRWG called a consultative meeting with the scientific leadership of professional societies on July 30, with the PRWG co-chairs and NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, MD, in attendance.

President Shupnik represented the Society at the meeting and conveyed some of the overarching concerns and suggestions of members. She stated that in order to ensure fair and expert review, the best scientists must participate in the process. Voluntary participation and commitment to serve on study sections has waned in recent years, and President Shupnik voiced the concept that grant funding should be tied to service on a review panel. This can be achieved either by requiring all grantees to be in a “pool” of reviewers that may be called upon to serve or by providing additional funding to those grantees who volunteer. She also stressed that continuity of review and reviewers throughout the process for resubmitted grants is necessary for those applications to be judged fairly and effectively.

President Shupnik also emphasized the need for NIH to establish a study section with clinical expertise to review applications for clinical research studies, and she stated that harmonization of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) will be required to ensure fully fair and equitable review of clinical research applications.

Many professional societies attended the meeting, and several novel ideas were introduced. These included pre-submission of executive summaries of grants and the ranking of unfunded grants by “fundability,” or the probability of future funding. Both suggestions were intended to decrease the investment of time and resources that investigators put into grant applications that have no chance of being funded. These approaches might also help to alleviate the time wasted by the review panels in reading grants that have little merit.

Dr. Yamamoto introduced the idea of changing from the current system of three competitive cycles per year to a system that would function more like an editorial board, with open deadlines. Some members of the audience echoed and expanded on the idea as the meeting continued, and the concept may be discussed in the future.

Dr. Zerhouni presented a summary describing his take-away messages from the meeting. He stated that the scientific community and NIH shared the common goals of identifying the best science and scientists without bias and with the least burden possible on reviewers and the peer review system. He also listed some concerns that he heard from the societies including the need to balance a broad scientific understanding and focused expertise required for in-depth review of grant applications.

The PRWG will synthesize the information gained from the meeting and present it to the full ACD, along with recommendations on how to move forward.

For more information on the July 30 meeting and the peer review process at NIH, visit https://www.yesevents.com/nih/regclosed.html.  The NIH has issued a Request for Information (RFI, Notice Number: NOT-OD-07-074) inviting individual feedback from the scientific community. The Society encourages its members to respond to the RFI.