[Fomite]

`The funding game in academic science is kind of miserable. Researchers eager to maintain positions for their post docs and grad students etc pay high levels of attention to which way the funding story is going -> ie, telling funders what they want to hear is the key skill. This is not always focused on new ideas. That's because it is pretty horrible not to get funded, so getting funding is a top priority?`

I think this is oft, but not always, overstated (note, not the bit about the funding game being miserable - it is). I've had a relatively successful track record as new faculty, and my best scored grants are also my most daring. Significance and Innovation is one of the criteria the NIH reviews on, and funding is tight enough that a "meh" score there can torpedo a grant. Getting to know what your funder (and most importantly, your particular program officer) wants is critical, but what they want is not always "safe" science.

The advice I give my trainees is "Learn how to tell your story" and "Stop blowing off your Specific Aims page, it's the most important."

`Then there are compliance costs (you need to train your researches on project costing / job codes for payroll, procurement processes with federal funds etc)`

Almost all of this is handled by departmental staff or a sponsored programs office at every institution I've ever been at, using the indirect costs that Hacker News is always so fond of talking about.

[derbOac]

Idk. There's a sweet spot when it comes to novelty and funding, and I'm not sure it's always where it should be. I also think there's a certain relativism about novelty, in that what is novel in a subfield might look pretty conservative to an outsider.

All these studies of grants etc are overshadowed by this problem, which is that they typically use citations etc as some kind of metric of quality. The problem with that, in turn, is that over a reasonable study span, variation in those citations is going to be driven by self-seeking behavior. That is, what's popular is what's funded, but also what's cited. There's a certain bias in it, in that you don't learn about the novel studies that never were studied due to being too novel, and the truly paradigm shifting papers, which are cited at high rates, are kinda washed out by the hundreds or thousands of papers that just kinda creep along.

It's difficult for me to put into words what's on my mind. But when I think of colleagues who are well funded, even those I consider friends and people I respect, I don't think of their work as being innovative. It's very much in the status quo. Very technically well done, but basically data generating machines within a status quo paradigm.

The things that shake things up tend to come from elsewhere, from industry or accidents or secondary reanalysis of old data, or things that get funded off of miscellaneous sources scrounged together. It's as if true innovation happens regardless of grants, or in spite of it, and after everyone agrees it's the accepted thing, then it gets funded, after the fact.

[Fomite]

There's definitely a sweet spot, and I don't think we're near the optimum. For a lot of people, I think grants actually aren't "Fund me thinking up an innovative idea", but are taking an innovative idea that's emerged from pilot data, a side project, etc. and spending X years formalizing and solidifying it.

[tempnow987]

All good points. My own sense is that if your carry isn't too big (you are not feeling a ton of pressure to maintain a pretty big funding line) life is better all around?

My own indirect experience is not NIH, but gov lab related work. This is I think more bureaucratic because the labs have funding streams, and the key goal can be not to f it up. That might move things to a somewhat heavier compliance model.

I'm not against indirect costs rates, they are a HUGE efficiency winner to avoid needing to push paper at the individual level. That said, the system it funds is not itself that efficient.

UC Berkeley I think is going to be 60%+ indirect rate for 22-23 as a local point of reference - I don't work there though.

So if you get $400K in the door you get to "keep" $160K of it.

[Fomite]

`All good points. My own sense is that if your carry isn't too big (you are not feeling a ton of pressure to maintain a pretty big funding line) life is better all around?`

Absolutely. The standard in my field is somewhere between a 50% and 100% soft money position. Mine is only 25%, and while I could probably fish around for a position at a more prestigious university, it's a big boost to my ability to go "Yeah, that seems neat, lets do it" and thus a major quality of life boost.

`UC Berkeley I think is going to be 60%+ indirect rate for 22-23 as a local point of reference - I don't work there though.`

This is not how you calculate indirect rates.

Indirect rates are a percentage of your direct rates. If X is the money you get for your lab (i.e. direct costs) and the indirect rate is 60%, then the actual calculation is 1.6X = 400,000, so X = $250,000.

If you want to point a finger at the thing that's probably the most harmful to the funding of science, it's not indirect rates. IMO, it's that the NIH budget cap for a modular R01 was set at $250,000 in direct costs in *1999* and has never moved from that.

[tempnow987]

25% sounds awesome - that's in cool and interesting projects range! Do you have responsibility for other positions. Not sure how it works where you are, I know someone who was very stressed because their proposals "carried" a fairly large group of folks.

Good point on indirect rates - I was being too quick there. Salary costs can be lower because you have to layer on fringe as well (which can be a separate pool or just a direct calc). So salary * 1.X (fringe) * 1.Y (indirect) = total award?

[Fomite]

Answering this bit first:

`Good point on indirect rates - I was being too quick there. Salary costs can be lower because you have to layer on fringe as well (which can be a separate pool or just a direct calc). So salary * 1.X (fringe) * 1.Y (indirect) = total award?`

Yeah, this is how that math works, at least at my institution, with some rare exceptions.

`25% sounds awesome - that's in cool and interesting projects range! Do you have responsibility for other positions. Not sure how it works where you are, I know someone who was very stressed because their proposals "carried" a fairly large group of folks.`

It really is awesome, and I'm tremendously privileged to be in that position. It's especially nice in my field (infectious disease epidemiology) because in basically all outbreaks, the work we do is uncompensated for ~ 6 months or so and then you sort of hope for grants to back fill it (I had, for example, done my best work on the pandemic prior to getting any funding for it).

You have however nailed the primary source of my stress - keeping "my" people funded. Graduate students (the downside of my position is its in a place where TA lines are functionally non-existent), postdocs, etc. are my responsibility, and keeping them funded is most of the reason I write grants.

We're experimenting for some staff positions (because 100% funding a staff scientist on grant money is daunting and terrifying for a single PI) with using a pool of funding, to address that while four of us may be able to pay 25% of a data analyst, none of us can pay 100%, with gaps in that backfilled by some institutional resources.