Grant Sharing

[Alexander Berezin]

GRANT SHARING

Recent rumours (if they are confirmed) indicate that 
pockets of decency may still be alive among 
the members of the university research community.

According to these rumours, some departments are
transcending egoistic "take from him and give to
me" attitudes of classical grantsmanship. The said
departments are introducing small taxation of the
existing grants within the department (rate is 
unknown) and use the proceeds to provide small 
research grants to unfunded colleagues. 

If confirmed, this grass-roots initiative presents
a major ethical challenge to the immoral and 
intellectually coercive policies of grant "selectivity" 
practiced by all major research funding agencies (NSERC,
MRC, NIH, NSF, etc). Their funding apartheid is "based" 
on the inherently unreliable and arbitrary anonymous 
peer review conducted by secretive and completely 
unaccountable grant selection panels. This policy is 
the major source of enjoyment for the innumerous ranks 
of the paper shuffling bureaucracy (those who "select" 
are "important").

I would like to invite public comments on this initiative 
through posting on the BIOFORUM and BIOCAN newsgroups. 
Also, those who want to input this discussion but by one 
reason or another prefer to remain anonymous may send their
comments to me and I (in case such wish will be expressed
explicitly), will re-post the comments anonymously 
   [ Anonymous peer review fans : don't jump on me : this 
is NOT my endorsement of the peer review anonymity : all
(requested) comments, agreeable or disagreeable, will 
be re-posted in full ].
 
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Alexander A. Berezin, PhD
Department of Engineering Physics
McMaster University, Hamilton,
Ontario, Canada, L8S 4L7
tel. (905) 525-9140 ext. 24546
e-mail: BEREZIN at MCMASTER.CA
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