As the only federal agency charged with
strengthening the nation's research performance in essentially
all fields of science and engineering, NSF aims to support a balanced
portfolio of excellent research projects across all fields of
science and engineering. Balance is sought through program planning,
recognition of scientific opportunities, project selection, resource
management, partnerships to reinforce and help fund our priorities,
and attention to enabling present and future researchers to produce
excellent research.
Candidates for Enhanced Investment
One of the first steps in managing the
portfolio is to identify areas where enhanced investments will
have a significant impact on the progress of science and engineering.
Building intellectual capital that takes advantage of emerging
scientific opportunities is key to keeping the U.S. at the cutting
edge of research. NSF has identified three factors that are driving
current change in the conduct of science and engineering research:
Attention to these factors helps us
develop mid-term objectives for progress toward the overall goals
of the NSF strategic plan.
Ensuring Sufficient Resources for
Each Research Project Funded
NSF realizes that adequate resources
are vital to each project's success, and is committed to providing
them to every research project and center it supports. An
agency goal is to continue to raise the median annual award size,
as we have done over the last several years, to sustain the "buying
power" of funded research projects. NSF has determined
that, if necessary, it will decrease the number of awards made
before decreasing award sizes.
NSF is also taking steps to increase
award durations as a mechanism of improving performance. Increasing
award durations helps the research enterprise in two ways: it
allows more time for the successful completion of projects, and
it streamlines the application process by requiring less frequent
re-submission of proposals. Longer award duration is balanced
with the need for recurring project evaluation and merit review.
Although the average duration of research project support
has remained stable over the past ten years, an agency goal is
to modestly increase award durations during FY 1998.
Merit Review System
NSF processes about 30,000 competitive
proposals each year, including almost 25,000 for research project
support. Over 95 percent of these proposals undergo external
merit review. (Proposals not subject to formal external review
include such activities as small workshops and the Small Grants
for Exploratory Research Program, which are reviewed internally).
NSF receives over 170,000 reviews each year, including over 70,000
reviews by mail, to help evaluate these proposals.
The funding rate is the number of competitive awards made during a year as a percentage of total proposals competitively reviewed. Funding rates for Research Project Support have fluctuated over the last several years.
NSF is currently examining all aspects
of the proposal review process, including ways to streamline it
without diminishing the quality of review decisions. A task force
has proposed new generic merit-review criteria to be used in NSF
project selection; these criteria are now being reviewed by a
public-comment process. Another team, largely external to NSF,
is developing options for addressing current strains on NSF's
merit review system.
NSF recognizes the importance of
having a diverse group of reviewers as part of the merit review
process; an ongoing agency goal is to continue to increase the
number of female, minority, and non-academic reviewers in the
coming years. The number
of women invited to review proposals has more than doubled in
the last eight years, and women as a percentage of all reviewers
has risen from 10 percent to 14 percent. Likewise, NSF recruits
reviewers from under-represented ethnic groups from geographically
diverse areas, and from non-academic scientists and engineers
to provide a balanced review perspective.
The merit review process enables NSF
to tap expertise in the entire science, engineering, and education
community in order to assess and increase the overall value of
the public's investments in research projects. This allows NSF
to advance the state-of-the-art, shifting funds into promising
new areas of inquiry, while maintaining balance across all the
disciplines. As current awards expire, funds are reallocated
to new opportunities. Supporting areas of emerging opportunity
using the merit review process maintains the traditional high
standards of excellence of NSF-supported research.
Monitoring Participation of Special
Groups
NSF encourages special groups of investigators
to increase their participation in the science research enterprise:
new principal investigators (PIs) (those who did not have an NSF
award in the 5-year period preceding the proposal), female principal
investigators, and minority principal investigators. Each of
these groups is crucial to making the national research infrastructure
healthy and whole.
New principal investigators are important
to the nation because they include future leaders of U.S. research.
Bringing top notch young scientists and engineers into the system
ensures continued excellence in research projects. While new
principal investigators naturally have lower than average funding
rates due to their inexperience, they received over 28 percent
of competitive research project awards in both FY 1995 and FY
1996. NSF monitors these rates to ensure that a cadre of outstanding
new investigators is indeed always arriving on the national R&D
scene and receiving funding.
An ongoing goal of NSF is to ensure
that the research enterprise is open to participation by all scientists
and engineers.
All principal investigators receive
written copies of all reviews. Most of the new PIs that have
been declined use these reviews to improve their proposals and
resubmit them to NSF.
Just as new principal investigators
bring a different perspective and ensure the future health of
science in the nation, so female and minority principal investigators
broaden perspective and ensure the health of science in the nation
now. NSF's ongoing goal is to maintain these funding rates,
while also increasing the number of females and minorities submitting
proposals.
Partnerships
NSF derives many benefits from joining
with other research fund providers in shared projects, and encouraging
partnerships among various research performers. Effective partnerships
broaden the views of participants from diverse settings, and increase
their mobility and understanding of the goals of different parts
of the research enterprise. They also uncover common objectives
and efforts which can benefit from comparative advantages and
economies of scale. For example, through interagency agreements,
NSF-funded researchers may gain access to resources available
through other federal agencies and other sources.
Promoting partnerships is one of NSF's
core strategies. An indication of NSF's ability to use this strategy
is the recent high level of support for NSF-funded projects provided
by non-NSF sources, estimated to have been at least $1.4 billion
in FY 1995 (for all of NSF's investments combined), and $1.7 billion
in FY 1996. Besides strengthening linkages among the parts of
the scientific enterprise, such funds magnify the effects of NSF
efforts at priority setting.
Program Evaluation
Performance highlights for the Research
Project Support function-results from the research projects we
invest in-are set out below. In addition to such results, NSF
uses evaluation studies to determine the merits and impacts
of programs, to find ways in which they can be improved, and to
inform planning for the future. These studies are of various
sorts.
Two recent examples of program evaluation
come from the Engineering Activity. Preliminary results from
an ongoing retrospective study of NSF's role in the emergence
of significant engineering-based innovations found that NSF's
involvement can best be described as enablement, that it extended
over many years and included numerous modes of support, and often
occurred at crucial points in an innovation's development. Depending
on the innovation studied, NSF's main role was either direct research
support, or contributions to the supporting technologies and the
relevantly trained people who helped develop the innovation, or
organizational and coordinating leadership to move the innovation
(the Internet, in this case) into the private sector. Another
study, of interaction between Engineering Research Centers and
participating companies, found that nearly 90 percent of firms
received benefits from their participation in the ERCs, and two-thirds
also experienced some positive impact on competitiveness. Companies
experienced a wide variety of benefits, with the most valued being
hiring students and graduates of the ERCs.
Other examples are the two recent evaluation
studies of the NSF Science and Technology Centers program. One
of these studies was performed by the Committee on Science, Engineering,
and Public Policy of the National Academy of Sciences; the other
by Abt Associates. In addition, an ad hoc STC Advisory
Committee was convened to provide NSF with recommendations concerning
the future of the STC program within the context of NSF's Strategic
Plan. The committee used input from the two earlier studies as
well as from NSF staff and STC directors. All these assessments
concluded that the Science and Technology Centers program is making
a major contribution to the nation's scientific and engineering
research for a modest investment. In addition to recommending
the continuation of the program, these reviews made many other
recommendations, including suggestions about relative emphasis
among goals and about management of the program, that contained
valuable information and judgments.
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