Finn Lübber

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

🔥 A lottery-first system 🎲 makes research grants allocation cheaper, faster, and boosts funding for women, while "traditional" (patriarcal?) peer review drags everyone down.

🤔 Maybe randomness is fairer than the experts.

🔄 Time to rethink the whole game! 💣

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧪

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

Leaders at @ukri.org should be seriously looking at the lottery first idea. 68% lower economic costs, increase in diversity of award holders and well received.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Full author list:
@soerenkrach.bsky.social
@fmpaulus.bsky.social
Lena Rademacher,
all from @uniluebeck.bsky.social and
@rimamrahal.bsky.social from @univie.ac.at

Figure shows general preference for the conventional approach (one stage peer review) and the lottery first approach (lottery followed by peer review) as individual data points ranging from 0 (prefer conventional) to 100 (prefer lottery first). Applicants and reviewers seem to be split with around 50% of each group favoring one approach over the other. While the distribution for applications is more uniform with a mode around 50, the reviewers distribution is more bimodal with few people selecting 50.

While a pure lottery is often met with criticism, applicants were quite satisfied with this new mechanism of combining lottery and peer review, with about half of them favoring the lottery-first over the conventional approach.

Figure shows to bars indicating overall costs for the two procedures: conventional (one stage peer review) and Lottery-first (lottery followed by peer review). The conventional approach is more costly with more than 13 million €, while the lottery-first approach only had cumulative costs of less than 5 million €.

Additionally, estimated overall costs for distributing the 50 million € where lower than 5 million €, while a conventional approach with a single peer review-step would have cost more than 13 million €.

In a first-come, first-served procedure used 2022, 40.8% of applicants and 38.0% of awardees were female. In a lottery-first procedure used in two subsequent years, these percentages were higher. In 2023 they were 44.7 and 46.6%, and in 2024 they were 45.1 and 47.4%.

Using data from the Freiraum-funding line of the German Foundation for innovation in higher education (stiftung-hochschullehre.de/en/) we now find evidence for that: An increased share in female applicants and grant awardees compared to a previously used procedure.

We also created a shiny app to calculate economic costs of funding procedures which you can try here: osi-luebeck.shinyapps.io/socostli/

We proposed this approach in a previous publication, arguing that it should reduce biases and economic costs of funding allocation. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (OA-Link: share.google/f53hLyN2bLLo...)

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

New publication about funding! In this new piece in @natcomms.nature.com we present data from an evaluation of the lottery-first approach to funding: an initial lottery controlling entry, followed by peer review. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#funding #metascience #scienceofscience #peerreview

1st post on bsky - about bsky! I was fascinated with academic starter packs and made an interactive network to see academic communities and how they connect - a map of knowledge! link to an interactive & searchable network: ketikagarg.github.io/blueSkyAcade...

"our scientific representations are not, as many hoped in the heyday of logical empiricism, a super vending machine to which we can feed in facts about the questions we are interested in, turn the crank of logical derivation, and pick up answers that fall out." —Cartwright, The Tangle of Science

Great, thank you!

Thank you!

Hi Amanda, thank you for setting this up! Could you add me to the list as well?

Dear Florian, please add me to the list as well.