Research Grants

I will post today a sarcastic description of the research year in Oz. With the summer extending from December until March, and with Christmas and New Year's Eve happening in the heart of the summer, pretty much all January is a month of vacation, or the equivalent of the European August. Everyone goes on vacation and research is at its lowest point. Nevertheless, the largest governmental body giving funds for research (health and medicine), aka NHMRC, schedules the only one deadline for grant submissions at the end of February/beginning of March. This does not deter researchers from relaxing in fun places; it just annoys them by forcing them to also think of grants, maybe even start preparing them... And yes, you heard (read) it well; there is only one deadline a year, only one round of applications submitted, and one round of grant reviews and financing. For a country as small as Oz, this translates into a review crisis. Your direct collaborators cannot review your grant (conflict of interest), and of those who are in the field besides you and your collaborators, now they have to review all grants that are submitted in a year in that area of research. Reviewer exhaustion I call it. This leads to a grant being reviewed by a postdoc who has little experience in the field, or by someone who has so little experience in the field, they don't understand what you are talking about. They will ask some questions and you will send a rebuttal, but in the end that’s not taken into consideration and the recommendation for funding will go to another grant. Let's pretend you got a grant though. If you didn't, you'd need to wait for another whole year to apply and by then you may already be fired (sorry, this word is not used here; what they say is "your contract is not being renewed" and since everyone is on a contract, it really, honestly means that you are fired). My description would be too short. The happy scenario in which you got a grant continues with you paying a postdoctoral fellow a salary so good they will never want to leave your lab to be independent. Basically, double the salary of an American postdoc and you know the number of dollars an Aussie postdoc makes. And double also their days of vacation! The postdoc then will go on to have a baby, because the institution will keep her job for a year and will pay her the salary for at least 3 months. But you don't publish papers this year without a postdoc, and the cycle of grant applications is on again. OMG! The reviewers who are really not so able to review your grant but can count your papers will be stuck at zero, you will not get funded and you have looped back to the sad scenario: your contract is not being renewed! Sorry!