Endocrine Insider
October 1, 2008 

On September 30, NIH announced its first-stage priorities for enhancing peer review, with implementation set to begin early 2009.  The priorities and initiatives were identified after a year-long review process in which stakeholders in the scientific community provided feedback and recommendations to NIH to improve the process of peer review.  The Endocrine Society engaged in the community activities and joined the broader biomedical research community in recommending several enhancements.  As previously reported in Endocrine Insider, Society Past-President Shupnik presented the Society's recommendations to the NIH Peer Review Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the Director at a stakeholder meeting in Washington, DC, in July 2007. 

The current plans address three priority areas—engaging the best reviewers, improving the quality and transparency of review, and ensuring balanced and fair reviews across scientific fields and career stages while reducing administrative burden.

Plans to engage the best reviewers include providing reviewers with flexibility in their tour of duty and conducting pilots of virtual review methods.

To improve quality and transparency, the Agency proposes a new criterion-based scoring scale with structured critiques beginning in May 2009.  Applications will be shortened, and streamlined applications will receive preliminary scores in 2009.

Efforts to ensure balanced and fair reviews will begin by clustering and reviewing separately applications from newly defined Early Stage Investigators .  NIH is considering similar clustering for clinical research applications and is also considering separate percentile rankings for new and resubmitted proposals.

For details about the effort to enhance peer review at NIH, click here.