Saving the Trouble

Bora Zivkovic rounds up a discussion he sparked the other day after posting an article that said in the Canadian grant system, the cost of preparing a grant application (C$40,000) outweighed the amount of an average grant (C$30,000). The article then suggested to give "every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000." Zivkovic discusses where the quality control would come from -- the universities who hired the scientists in the first place and colleagues at conferences and during review for publication -- and draws from another paper on the four stages of science, and says that these baseline grants would mainly go to the first stage, the innovative stage and that would be "a Good Thing."