Research funding today is complicated. 

Much of that complexity traces back to World War II, which reshaped who pays for science. Prior to the war, most research funding came from philanthropic donations and government labs. Depending on the donor, funds were used for a new building or to support a specific researcher. For instance, Thomas Hunt Morgan, known as the father of Drosophila genetics, spent one year working at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, a research institute founded by Anton Dohrn using his inherited family wealth.

This arrangement changed when the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) was formed in 1941 to support research into bombs, radar, and medical drugs—one of the most successful endeavors of the war effort. This research could not be done quickly or efficiently enough at government labs, so the government contracted civilian scientists working in university labs. The contracts laid out the research problem, the primary investigator, the budget, and a timeline. 

After the war, ORSD director Vannevar Bush published Science – The Endless Frontier in 1945, which argued that it was in the national interest to continue supporting basic science research in university labs. This whitepaper, which led to the reorganization of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as other agencies, is considered the framework for how the government funds research projects at universities today.

This is still how we do research, albeit with a few more laws and regulations than Bush envisioned in 1945. Determining how to pay for research has always been a challenge, but this model of government–academic collaboration made the United States a global scientific powerhouse where scientific studies became its greatest post-war export, outperforming countries that stuck with the pre-WWII model that relied on philanthropic funding for research done at universities.

The OSRD also gave us indirect costs (IDCs). Research was being conducted by professors and researchers contracted by the federal government and instead of doing the work in a government lab, they used their university spaces. As a result, those institutions had to pay for the faculties, equipment, and other associated costs. The OSRD allowed IDC compensation—the institutions would be reimbursed for these costs, but were not allowed to profit from the war. 

As the Research Funding Roadmap shows, the pathway to obtaining funding isn’t always simple—partly because of how we train researchers. Graduate education in the sciences doesn’t include financial training covering budget reconciliation and fund management. Instead, these services are provided by trained research administrators.  

The downside to our current research-funding model is that grant review—which for many funding agencies follows a typical pattern known as the grant lifecycle—is long and complex. Funding agencies like the NIH, NSF, or even private foundations announce their research priorities and when they’re accepting proposals, typically referred to as Notice Of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs).

Once a NOFO is live, researchers, research administrators, and other support staff will put together a proposal or grant, and submit it to the funding agency by the relevant deadline. The NIH has a few standard deadlines, but each NOFO is unique so it’s important to stay vigilant.

The funding agency typically starts the review process with an initial screening, where they check that all materials and basic requirements have been met. Then, they’ll assess the grant’s technical quality and alignment with the agency’s funding priorities. Federal agency review panels are often staffed by scientists whose expertise is key when reviewing for technical capacity, innovation, and approach of a grant. They will typically score the grant on these factors. Simultaneously, grant budgets are reviewed for compliance and justified use of resources. 

After review by a scientific panel, the agency looks at the distribution of grants by percentile score. If there’s a bell curve distribution, they may draw a line on the far right of the curve (determined by the number of grants that they can afford to fund), to indicate that all grants that scored above that line will be funded. Then, they may do a secondary review of the next-highest scoring percentile range, making strategic decisions on which grants to accept based on their remaining funds. They will reject the rest of the grants, scoring them below the percentile range that the agency wanted to fund.

Successful grant writing is a skill, which is why some institutions now have research development professionals on staff to help researchers with proposal development and refinement.

In the next Research Funding Roadmap blog post, we’ll cover policy debates on IDCs and a proposal by research institutions to answer current challenges in IDC rate calculations.

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