Good Science Project – Good Science Project

Mission and Strategy

Our mission is to improve the funding and practice of science.

Funding agencies should engage in bold experimentation to reduce bureaucracy, fund new ideas, and speed up innovation. Moreover, they should make much more data available so that independent scholars can evaluate the results.

For more on these ideas, read our Statement of Principles (with multiple signatories).

The Good Science Project engages in communications and public advocacy towards these goals. Our theory of change is that communications can affect the course of public debate, and ultimately influence policymakers.

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Issues

Reducing Unnecessary Bureaucracy

Federally-funded scientists spend too much of their time waiting to hear whether a proposal was approved, filing bureaucratic reports, etc. We need to streamline practices so that scientists can waste less time jumping through hoops, and spend more time on science.

Institutional Innovation

Too many scientific institutions (whether funding agencies or universities) fall into the same patterns and structures. Scientific innovation is more likely when there is a greater diversity of institutional approaches.

Funding High-Risk, High-Reward Science

Breakthrough scientific ideas have often been unpopular, and can have particular trouble getting funded. We need to experiment with different funding mechanisms and peer review models to see what works, and what might be more open to new ideas.

Funding Exploration

Goal-directed research (such as a “cancer moonshot”) is often more popular than fundamental, exploratory research. Funders need to ensure that a substantial part of their portfolio goes to fundamental science, which sets the stage for advancement in the future.

Improving Scientific Quality

Too much low-quality science gets funded and published every year. Funding practices can actually create perverse incentives that encourage such work. Funders need to bend over backwards to incentivize good science rather than low-quality science.

Rebalancing the Research Enterprise

There are arguably too many people being trained as graduate students and post-docs compared to the number of academic positions available. At the same time, there are too few career options for people who would be excellent at managing research labs, writing research software, etc. We need to have better calibration between the number of trainees and the amounts and types of research careers available.