[Below is a guest post by & Joel Katzav & Krist Vaesen. They published a widely noted paper, "How much would each researcher receive if competitive government research funding were distributed equally among researchers?" (PLOS, 2017), which attracted criticism from NWO; the Dutch equivalent of the NSF. I am pleased to host their response.--ES]
This post is a response to the concerns expressed by Professor Stan Gielen, president of the Executive Board of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), about our paper [1]. We also bolster our case for the feasibility of more egalitarian ways of distributing research funding.
Professor Gielen argues that those of our calculations which support the feasibility of a more egalitarian distribution of research funds are mistaken in three respects. The most serious mistake would, if indeed it were a mistake, be that the calculations underestimate, by 40%, the number of Dutch professors (from assistant to full professors). More specifically, we supposedly forgot to include in our calculations professors who are affiliated with Dutch research hospitals.
It is correct that we excluded professors working at Dutch research hospitals from our calculations. But we also excluded the budgets that the NWO allocates to these hospitals. In other words, we estimated the budgets that the NWO allocates to universities (excluding research hospitals), and divided that number by the number of professors working at Dutch universities (so excluding professors working at research hospitals). No mistake was made.
The reasons for excluding researchers affiliated with research hospitals are twofold. First, to our knowledge, estimates of the number of staff members at Dutch research hospitals have not been made public. We do have figures for the number of full professors [2], but not for professors below that rank. Second, due to the way in which Dutch research hospitals are allocated research funding, their reliance on competitive government research funding seems to be relatively low. For instance, while Dutch universities received a total of €420 million in 2014, Dutch research hospitals received only €62 million. In any case, if it were to turn out that egalitarian sharing at research hospitals is not feasible, that wouldn’t undermine our claim that such sharing is feasible when it concerns research at universities.
Second, Professor Gielen argues that we mistakenly assume that competitive funding awarded by funding agencies does not cover the salaries of awardees. He points to two specific competitive funding schemes: NWO’s so-called “Vernieuwingsimpuls” (which offers three types of award: Veni, Vidi and Vici) and the ERC grant scheme. In response, note that in the paper we write that “in the Netherlands the salaries of faculty members are usually covered by their own universities (rather than by grant money)” [italics added]. So we do acknowledge that the salaries of some awardees are not covered by universities. More importantly, universities have (non-competitively awarded) funding that covers the salaries of tenured and tenure-track professors. Insofar as competitive funding assists in paying professors’ salaries, it is accordingly the salaries of those on temporary contracts. We estimate that the percentage of professors thus supported by the funding schemes Gielen refers to is under 5%. We estimate that about 510 academics at universities have Vidi or Vici grants in any particular, recent year [3]. About 18% (roughly the percentage of Dutch professors on temporary contracts in 2014 [4]) of these, i.e., only 92, will be on temporary contracts and thus will have salaries which perhaps are not covered by non-competitive funding. The number of those supported by ERC research grants is likely to be even lower. We do, to be sure, estimate that there are 750 active Veni awards in any particular year [5]. But many of these are held by Postdocs and, while the rest are held by assistant professors, only about 30% of assistant professors with Veni awards (the percentage of assistant professors on temporary contracts [4]) might need to have their salaries covered by competitive funding. The total number of Dutch university professors in 2014 was 9,702 (in fte).
Finally, third, Professor Gielen remarks that we have underestimated the salary costs of Dutch PhD students. To substantiate this claim, Professor Gielen refers to recently published tables that mention, for 2017, an annual cost of €57.5k. However, we made our calculations for the reference year 2014 (due to the incompleteness of the relevant datasets for the years after 2014). Hence, we were justified in using the annual costs of 2014 (i.e., €47.5k), rather than those of 2017. Furthermore, from this cost we need to subtract, as we did in the paper, the government bonus universities receive upon a PhD’s graduation. Given a graduation rate of 75%, the annual cost of a PhD student in the Netherlands amounts to ~€30k.
As mentioned before, we wish to provide an additional argument for the feasibility of a more equal distribution of research funding. It has been estimated, for the Netherlands, that for every euro that a university receives through competition, it invests, on average, and from money acquired through fixed funding, an additional ~0.74 euro [6]. Universities provide these so-called matching costs in order to provide auxiliary support (equipment, technical staff, facilities, and so forth) to awardees. This suggests that, de facto, a much larger budget is currently being allocated through competition than the budget we estimated in our paper. If universities were also to distribute some of these matching costs equally among all staff members, the flat baseline rate would be higher than the $505k estimated in our paper.
[2] https://www.rathenau.nl/nl/publicatie/feiten-en-cijfers-de-nederlandse-universitair-medische-centra
[3] The total number of awardees can be found on the NWO website (see the links below). We deduct from this number the number of those working at Dutch research hospitals. The latter number is calculated on the basis of [2].
[4] http://www.vsnu.nl/f_c_personeel_downloads.html
Very interesting. another way to go, if someone wants to make a case that individual researchers or projects need more money than they'd get if the resources were equally distributed is to have a lottery to decide who gets funding. That way, at least, people have an equal chance at the funding.
Posted by: Chris Stephens | 10/11/2017 at 08:47 PM