Check, Please!

A new report by a panel from the US National Academies suggests that there needs to be more investment made in research, but one of its 10 recommendations for improving the state of research universities in the US may not go over well, says ScienceInsider's Jeffrey Mervis. The panel says the overhead costs of federally funded research — money spent on lab maintenance, administrator salaries, and so on — should be reimbursed to the government by the research institutions, and suggests that the money for reimbursement come from the money to fund the actual research, Mervis reports. "That revenue-neutral approach is meant to appeal to legislators trying to reduce overall government spending," he adds. "But it would mean less money available for individual researchers who already face long odds in obtaining a federal grant."