High Quality Research Act - National Science Foundation

["Kelly Wicks" <kwicks78@gmail.com>]

I noticed this has not been mentioned yet, so I thought I would. 
Since no one was "complaining" about this (DML).

The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a 
bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science 
Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. For good 
measure, it would also set in motion a process to determine whether the same 
criteria should be adopted by every other federal science agency.

The legislation, being worked up by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), 
represents the latest—and bluntest—attack on NSF by congressional Republicans 
seeking to halt what they believe is frivolous and wasteful research being 
funded in the social sciences. Last month, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) 
successfully attached language to a 2013 spending bill that prohibits NSF from 
funding any political science research for the rest of the fiscal year unless 
its director certifies that it pertains to economic development or national 
security. Smith's draft bill, called the "High Quality Research Act," would 
apply similar language to NSF's entire research portfolio across all the 
disciplines that it supports.

1) "… in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, 
prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the 
progress of science;

2) "… the finest quality, is groundbreaking, and answers questions or solves 
problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and

3) "… not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation 
or other Federal science agencies."

NSF's current guidelines ask reviewers to consider the "intellectual merit" of 
a proposed research project as well as its "broader impacts" on the scientific 
community and society.

More can be found here including the pdf link to the discussion draft or Google 
works to.

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2013/04/us-lawmaker-proposes-new-criteri-1.html
(406) 539-7382
kwicks78@gmail.com
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