Should we fund research randomly? An epistemological criticism of the lottery model as an alternative to peer review for the funding of science

Abstract

The way research is, and should be, funded by the public sphere is the subject of renewed interest for sociology, economics, management sciences, and more recently, for the philosophy of science. In this contribution, I propose a qualitative, epistemological criticism of the funding by lottery model, which is advocated by a growing number of scholars as an alternative to peer review. This lottery scheme draws on the lack of efficiency and of robustness of the peer-review-based evaluation to argue that the majority of public resources for basic science should be allocated randomly. I first differentiate between two distinct arguments used to defend this alternative funding scheme based on considerations about the logic of scientific research. To assess their epistemological limits, I then present and develop a conceptual frame, grounded on the notion of ‘system of practice’, which can be used to understand what precisely it means, for a research project, to be interesting or significant. I use this epistemological analysis to show that the lottery model is not theoretically optimal, since it underestimates the integration of all scientific projects in densely interconnected systems of conceptual, experimental, or technical practices which confer their proper interest to them. I also apply these arguments in order to criticize the classical peer-review process. I finally suggest, as a discussion, that some recently proposed models that bring to the fore a principle of decentralization of the evaluation and selection process may constitute a better alternative, if the practical conditions of their implementation are adequately settled.

"About ethics: Scientometric Research in WoS Core Collection (2011-2021)"

“…As a general aspect, the percentage of research funding in the field of ethics (25.91% of the total research funded, published and indexed in WoS) and the percentage of 49.63% of papers funded by HCP-HP, may be the subject of a study on the interest of institutional or national research in ethics. Discussions on the link between funding and the publication of articles can be found in the literature, which sometimes puts forward some critical remarks (Génova, 2016;Funder & all., 2014;Bedessem, 2020).…”

Peut-on affranchir la recherche biomédicale du modèle managérial ?

“…Dans ce modèle, un chercheur peut soumettre une demande en moins de trente minutes, obtenir une réponse dans les deux jours et recevoir les crédits une semaine plus tard [33]. Un autre modèle intrigant est celui du vote citoyen [34]. Il consiste à soumettre une liste de projets aux votes d'un groupe décentralisé de représentants d'une large gamme d'acteurs sociétaux plutôt que d'une minorité d'experts ou administrateurs.…”

“…Il existe une myriade de modèles alternatifs fondés sur des principes philosophiques différents de ceux du modèle managérial. Citons, entre autres, les modèles de loterie [31], de financement mutualiste [1], de redistribution collective [32], de Fast Grant [33], et de vote citoyen [34]. Sans entrer dans les détails, tous ces modèles ont en commun une distribution des crédits de recherche plus égalitaire, plus subventions [37].…”

Random grant allocation from the researchers’ perspective: Introducing the distinction into legitimate and illegitimate problems in Bourdieu’s field theory

“…Comments on random grant allocation have thus far come mainly from scholars who study science itself or who are involved in science policy. This group has split into supporters of the grant lottery (Avin, 2015(Avin, , 2019Fang and Casadevall, 2016;Gildenhuys, 2020;Roumbanis, 2019Roumbanis, , 2020 and opponents thereof (Bedessem, 2020;Reinhart and Schendzielorz, 2020). One reason for these different positions is that the debate has narrowed to a comparison between peer review and funding-by-lot.…”