NIH suggests slimming down grant assessment

Funder seeks feedback to whittle down assessment categories from five to three

The National Institutes of Health has started a consultation with the scientific community about an overhaul of its peer-review process for grants that would slim down assessment criteria. 

The funding agency’s directors said they wanted to revise and “simplify” the peer-review framework, which the NIH uses to hand out billions of dollars to researchers. This would help to facilitate “identification of the strongest, highest-impact research”, they said.