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As we start 2025, we are taking a brief look back at 2024 and our efforts to support and inform the extramural biomedical research community on NIH grant policies and initiatives. To get a sense of what captured our readers’ attention over the past year, the table below reveals readers’ interest (as measured by blog page visits) on the NIH-supported research workforce, upcoming peer review changes, overall funding dynamics, and more.
* also the tweet with the most impressions from @NIHGrants
We appreciate that researchers, reviewers, and administrators are preparing for the forthcoming changes to applications and peer review that will take effect for due dates on or after January 25th. As we stated last April, the simplified review framework is NIH’s first substantive change to the peer review process in a decade, following many thoughtful discussions with and feedback from the community. We believe it will help reviewers focus on the key questions to assess a proposed project’s scientific merit, mitigate the effects of reputational bias, and lessen reviewer burden. The changes coming for fellowship applications share a similar rationale so access to fellowships could be expanded to cast a wider net in identifying promising scientists.
NIH’s continued focus on early-stage investigators (ESIs), through the Next Generation Researchers Initiative, led to additional 1,587 researchers supported in fiscal year 2023 (the most recent year that complete data are available). Prioritizing these researchers appears to also be lowering the age at which they are first designated on an R01-equivalent award for ESIs (median age of 39 years) compared to others receiving their first award (median age of 48 years.
Many National Research Service Award (NRSA) Fellows took advantage of our childcare cost support benefit, which was increased to $3,000 per budget cycle to help defray these costs. Speaking of NRSAs, the NIH All About Grants podcast discussing the ins and outs of training grants was our most listened to conversation last year. Our focus on the workforce will continue in 2025, including communicating next steps to re-envision the postdoctoral experience and attempting to address the persistent hypercompetitive funding environment.
Ensuring integrity was another major continuing theme last year. For one, we announced that Common disclosure Forms for the Biographical Sketch and Current and Pending (Other) Support would be required for all applications and progress reports submitted later this spring. We issued a decision matrix that helps clarify grant related rules to mitigate potential foreign interference in NIH funded research. If such inappropriate interference is found, it represents one reason NIH may recover grant funds. And, we explained how implementing a provision in law is helping us foster safe and respectful workplaces wherever NIH supported research is conducted (see also this case study blog).
Deep dives into NIH grants data throughout 2024 revealed other interesting insights. We saw 58,951 awards made in FY 2023 to 2,743 recipients throughout the U.S. and internationally (increases for both categories over the prior year). There was a continued decline in the degree of inequality in the distribution of Research Project Grant funding to principal investigators. Substantive growth was observed in the number of researchers linking ORCID IDs to their eRA Commons profile (a requirement come May 2025 that will also lessen applicant burden). And we reported the breakdown of participants in NIH-funded clinical research during FY 2023 and explored the distribution of degree types held by supported principal investigators. The recently announced NIH Science of Science Scholars program is expected to help us further build upon these and other related analyses that use NIH grants data and assess NIH decision-making.
As 2025 begins, we remain dedicated to communicating our efforts through the blog, through the wider NIH Extramural Nexus (subscribe here), and through our recently revamped NIH Grants and Funding site. From innovative ways to use artificial intelligence, to implement new public access requirements, to strengthen research capacity across the country, and more, there will likely be much to talk about. We all wish you a happy new year.
Looks like you have a tremendous number of potentially ‘disguised’ diversity initiatives to either report on within the next few days or to terminate immediately. Are there grant application gender/race/ethnicity check boxes for the new cycle? What you have achieved with the equal gender distribution in a really short period of time as shown by your most popular post (and past data) is either miraculous or driven and maintained by all the diversity initiatives over the past 30 years. And all those gender selective university hirings that have been driven by diversity too! Discrimination has been illegal for quite some time, and immoral forever. How else do you explain all your data? Maybe the gender merit ratio was in fact slanted incorrectly such that the rapid increase can be easily rationalized. Is the current output of the genders indeed equal? Are there accommodations and initiatives supporting growth of the grass on one side of the fence but not the other based on gender, race etc? What a quandary. As a government employee, you are not even permitted to censor posts with political discussion content like this anymore. Your blog comment policy may need revised. What has everyone been thinking? I’m guessing the scienitific/medical community was afraid to critically comment on the topic. [You do get way too few blog comments for the number of views.] Discrimination has been rationalized, yet again. Throw the merit and medical/scientific progress out for social betterment? Or perhaps, it doesn’t really matter as long as we are payed and do a little here and there? Maybe bring up a new generation of more diverse researchers? Much of this is good indeed, but the end does not justify the means–or does it?