Competition is fine, but professors grumble that they spend too much time on grant applications.Still, these pressures push German universities in the right direction.
Plan your research program around this rhythm and do not try to run a heavy schedule of experiments or spend a lot of time on grant applications during those periods.
Research at the company is funded internally, "so we don't have to spend our time on writing grants".
Especially when we're not spending enough on basic research, we shouldn't be having researchers spend so much time on the grants process.
The same 2008 report recommended that NIH require that PIs spend at least 20% of their time on each grant (which would limit their total grants to five) unless researchers could justify an exception.
Did you raise your eyebrows at the amount of space in print, and time on air, granted to Gérard Depardieu's peeing-on-a-plane escapade?
When you do that, you get a real big leader who now, instead of giving me 20% of time on a grant, is going to give 50% time, or 60% time because this is what they've lived their career for.
Their list includes what they regard as unnecessary oversight of research, such as accounting for a scientist's time on a grant; the high cost of documenting some rules, such as those governing financial conflicts of interest; and conflicting requirements from different federal agencies on the same subject.
And, as Layoff's PI struggles to "collect dimes from everywhere," he spends a great deal of his time working on grant proposals.
The best way to minimise the time spent on grant applications for any funding body is to gain a good understanding of the criteria, formal and informal, under which that body operates.
