I've been reading quite a few articles recently in Science, Nature , Genetic Future and ScienceBlogs, among others. The speculation about how this economy is going to affect all researchers is clearly rampant.

On the one hand, the declining grant resources from endowments is very obvious. However, the direct effects of government spending and the consequent budget deficits on funding institutions like the NIH, NSF and others is harder to predict.

The new Obama administration has signaled clearly through both campaign promises and cabinet appointments that investment in scientific research is a priority. That kind of signal is encouraging for investigators, new and established, who hope to receive or extend funding in the next few years. However, the way this new investment converts to funds may favor some research, like that into alternative energy, more than others. The exact distribution is not predictable, and this unknown is lending itself to anxiety.

To address this anxiety, many proactive researchers are asking themselves how to increase their odds of grant awards in the future. This is a valid question, and one that I believe can be addressed in several ways.

1. Collaborate, don't compete.

After working in academic research for over a decade, I came to the conclusion that important research dollars were sometimes wasted when multiple labs competed inefficiently.

What do I mean by that? I mean that often multiple labs set their sights on precisely the same goal, with very much the same approach. The result seemed to be that one lab, usually the most established, and the one with the best record of prior successful grants, received the funding.

This is partly a side effect of the way labs compete within the existing funding structures for grants. There is often a "right" way and all of the "other" ways, the "right" way being one that was commonly approved by the NIH, and thus the template followed by others

While there are advantages to having consistency in grant submissions and the important need to reproduce findings for verification, I think more labs would achieve their funding goals if they corresponded with their potential competitors, and worked out courses of action that allowed each to persue their goals, while maximizing their unique contributions.

I know, this is a radical suggestion for academic science... why should any lab even consider adjusting their goals so that they compete less directly with another lab?

Because we, as research scientists, are expected to do our work not for our own goals, credentials, or publication records, but for the greater public good. And we use taxpayer and foundation money to do most of that work. We are actually public servants, and as such, should put the greater good ahead of our own desires, even when those desires are relatively noble.

I fear the "publish or perish" paradigm can override awareness of this higher justification for our work.

So I propose that ideally, when labs share overlapping goals, prior to submitting their grants, they organize to strategically approach funding for those goals in alternative and complementary ways, perhaps leading to greater odds of receiving funding for all.

I look forward to comments on this idea

2. Don't reinvent the wheel

This seems obvious.. if you can show that you used your money wisely with your current grant, you become a better prospect for future grants.

My favorite case study in this kind of inefficiency is the massive redundancy that I often saw in the use of bioinformatics computer programs. Every genomics lab has its own set of bioinformatics "tools" that they developed to specifically suite their needs. Aside from Blast, Blat and a few other standards, each lab would spend great time and money on their own toolkit.

Sometimes this meant hiring a professional developer, sometimes it meant a graduate student taking a 3-week class in Perl for Biologists... (remember going to talk after talk where yet another someone had programmed their own Monte Carlo Hidden Markov State model?)

But nearly always, it meant re-doing work that was available in a commercial package.

Admittedly, 10 years ago, the commercial applications were not necessarily high quality, or robust. For that matter, they weren't really usable by people without a computer programming degree. But that has changed dramatically over the last few years. And now, many of the common tasks in a lab can be accomplished by finding a commercial provider for that service.

It is similar to the time when a Ph.D. student had to know how to blow their own glass graduated cylinders to receive a degree... we wouldn't ever consider that a good use of our time now.