[matthewdgreen]

>I know of a researcher that held a multimillion dollar informatics grant for 3 years. In that 3 years they literally did nothing except collect money.

I hate that every HN post about academia ends with an anecdote describing some rare edge-case they've heard about. Intentional academic fraud is a very small percentage of what happens in academia. Partly this is because it's so stupid: academia pays poorly compared to industry, requires years to establish a reputation, and the systems make it hard to extract funds in a way that would be beneficial to the fraudster (hell, I can barely get reimbursed for buying pizza for my students.) So you're going to do a huge amount of work qualifying to receive a grant, write a proposal, and your reward is a relatively mediocre salary for a little while before you shred your reputation. Also, where is your "collected money" going? If you hire a team, then you're paying them to do nothing and collude with you, and your own ability to extract personal wealth is limited.

A much more common situation is that a researcher burns out or just fails to deliver much. That's always a risk in the academic funding world, and it's why grant agencies rarely give out 5-10 year grants (even though sometimes they should) and why the bar for getting a grant is so high. The idea is to let researchers do actual work, rather than having teams manage them and argue about their productivity.

(Also long-term unfunded project maintenance is a big, big problem. It's basically a labor of love slash charitable contribution at that point.)

[Bukhmanizer]

> I hate that every HN post about academia ends with an anecdote describing some rare edge-case they've heard about

This isn’t a rare edge case, this is very common in software projects. I’ve heard of it because I was part of the team brought in to fix the situation.

Intentional fraud only is rare when it’s recognized as fraud. P-hacking was incredibly widespread (and to some extent still is) because it wasn’t recognized as a form of fraud. Do you really think not delivering on a software project has any consequences? Who is going to go in and say what’s fraud, what’s incompetence, and what’s bad luck?

The problem is that the bar for getting software grants isn’t high, it’s nonsensical. As far as I can tell, ability to produce or manage software development isn’t factored in at all. As with everything else, it’s judged on papers, and the grant application. In some cases, having working software models and preexisting users end up being detrimental to the process, since it shows less of a “need” for the money. You get “stars” in their field, who end up with massive grants and no idea of how to implement their proposals. Conversely, plenty of scientists who slave away on their own time on personal projects that hundreds of other scientists depend on get no funding whatsoever.

[lazyjeff]

Just curious, what kind of 3-year informatics grant not being completed ends up with a team brought in to fix the situation? Multi-million dollar grants don't sound big enough to be a dependency for any major customer (like defense or pharma), so I imagine if fraud was detected, they would just demand a reimbursement and ban the PI.

But I think you're both right in some sense. The cases of intentional major fraud is probably a rare edge case and they make the news when they're uncovered. But there's a lot of grey-ish area like p-hacking as you mentioned, plus funding agencies know there needs to be some flexibility in the proposed timeline due to realities. Realities like you don't necessary get the perfect student for the project right when the grant starts, as the graduate student cycle is annual, plus the research changes over time and it isn't ideal to have students work on an exact plan as if they are an employee.

But I totally agree that maintaining software that people are using should be funded and rewarded by the academic communities. A possible way to do this is have a supplement so that after a grant is over, people who have software generated from the grant that is used by at least 10 external parties without COI, should be funded 100K/yr for however many years they are willing to maintain and improve it. Definitions of what this means needs to be carefully constructed, of course.

[Bukhmanizer]

I'll be a bit vague to protect my coworker's privacy, but the scientist was fired for other, unrelated violations, and my boss was brought in to replace him. I think he was leading an arm of a "U" grant, so he wasn't the only senior PI on it. Since they handled it internally, they couldn't just demand a reimbursement. On some level administration knew that the project wasn't moving forward, but once we started asking around, it was clear that there was no effort to start the project at all.

>But I totally agree that maintaining software that people are using should be funded and rewarded by the academic communities. A possible way to do this is have a supplement so that after a grant is over, people who have software generated from the grant that is used by at least 10 external parties without COI, should be funded 100K/yr for however many years they are willing to maintain and improve it. Definitions of what this means needs to be carefully constructed, of course.

I think that this is a great idea.