Not so fast with fast funding

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have become increasingly dissatisfied with how science funding is distributed. Traditional grant funding processes are seen as stifling the creativity of researchers, in addition to being bureaucratic, slow, and inefficient. Consequently, there have been increasing popular calls to make “fast funding” – fast, unbureaucratic grant applications – a new standard for scientific funding. Though this approach to funding, implemented by Fast Grants, has been successful as a pandemic response strategy, we believe there are serious costs to its wide-scale adoption, particularly for transparency and equity, and that the purported benefits – increased creativity and efficiency – are unlikely to materialize. While traditional funding mechanisms are certainly not perfect, scientific communities should think twice before adopting fast funding as a new standard for funding.

KEYWORDS:

• Science funding
• science policy

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank members of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values for helpful feedback. We also thank Mike Schneider and an anonymous reviewer for many helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2045007.