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APA comments on draft Strategic Plan of NIH’s Center for Scientific Review

NIH’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR) manages the majority of peer reviews for NIH grants and fair review processes for applicants, which are critically important for all psychological scientists.

Date created: March 24, 2022 2 min read
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American Psychological Association. (2022, March 24). APA comments on Draft Strategic Plan of NIH’s Center for Scientific Review. https://www.apaservices.org/advocacy/news/nih-scientific-review

A female scientist in a lab looking through a microscope

APA submitted commentsopens in new window (PDF, 205KB) on Center for Scientific Review (CSR)’s draft Strategic Planopens in new window (PDF, 7MB). The association focused its comments on ideas within the plan and from important input from APA members recommending approaches to enhance fairness in grant reviews. 

Managing the infrastructure and processes of grant review is one of NIH’s most important functions. While the peer review process at NIH is very competitive and highly regarded, psychologists and other scientists have raised concerns that Black scientists are only 55% as likely as White scientists to have their grants funded. The peer review process is not the only area that requires closer scrutiny to close that funding gap, but the NIH Center for Scientific Review is closely examining all its processes to ensure fairness to all grant applicants. 

Among the ideas APA suggested are: 

  • Setting goals to have the same percentage of grant reviewers of color in study sections as they have grant applicants of color.
  • Revisiting the conflict of interest policy, which states that reviewers cannot review proposals if they have collaborated on grants within the past three years. Among Black scholars, this policy has the effect of reducing an already small pool of reviewers who have the expertise to properly review proposals.
  • Revising the policy stipulating that a scholar must have received an R01 before she/he can serve as a standing member on a study section. This rule compounds an institutional problem that NIH has acknowledged: Too few scholars of color are eligible to review grants, because too few scholars of color are awarded grants.
  • Including an NIH ‘‘ambassador’’ trained in racism on review panels. The ambassador would ensure compliance and consistency of best practices across study sections (e.g., fairly drawn discussion lines, equitable grant discussion ratios based on diversity metrics such as race/ethnicity and gender prior to panels, inclusion of Black faculty on panels). 

APA also discussed new findings on racial disparities in grant funding with Richard Nakamura, the former head of CSR.

For more information, contact Pat Kobor.

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