Grant Review
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Friends,
We would appreciate if you could distribute this to other people inter-
ested in the grant process. We want to help to establish an Internet
backbone to the review of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other
grants.
We are very interested in the future of the Internet in health. One
area of particular importance is that of electronic publication and
Internet based peer review. As part of our Global Health Network we
have published papers in the British Medical Journal and Nature Medi-
cine on the potential of the Internet to Transform publication and the
grant review process.
We want your help to consider an Internet based grant review system.
This would speed up the process for the scientists, reduce the burden
on the reviewers, and reduce costs. The problem is we do not know what
the system should look like.
The NIH Peer review system is the best in the world. However, the in-
formation technology was developed in the 1950s, and it has not yet
adapted as its backbone the internet. We as scientists are using the
Internet in much of our work, but we have not adopted it for our
grants.
We therefore want global input concerning the establishment of an
Internet based system. Recently we submitted a grant titled Epidemio-
logy and the Internet to NIH on February 1, 1998. We just put this pro-
posal onto the Internet at the following URL:
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
and then clicking on "NIH grant".
We invite you to visit our grant review site and would like you to take
part in the project by:
1. submitting a review and priority score for the grant, and
2. commenting on advantages and disadvantages of an Internet-based
grant review system.
We are also looking for people who are interested in being Judges for
the grant. These individuals will be responsible for determining the
"FINAL Priority Score" for the grant based on their own review of the
proposal, on line discussion with other judges, and the reviews of sci-
entists submitted from around the world. We have had recent contact be
leaders at IBM and they are planning to join to help to establish "team
rooms" which are interactive areas where people can converse in privacy
on the web. We thought that this would be ideal for at least part of
the review process.
Please let us know if you would like to be a judge for this project,
the only requirement is that you must have previously reviewed NIH
grant proposals or been part of an NIH study section. Send an e-mail to
Ron LaPorte <rlaporte@vms.cis.pitt.edu> if you are interested in being
a judge.
The grant will be available for review until April 1, 1998. We would
very much appreciate your evaluation. We will write a publication on
this with all people who participated listed as contributors.
Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D.
Deborah J. Aaron, Ph.D.
Akira Sekikawa, M.D.
WHO Collaborating Center
Department of Epidemiology
Graduate School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA
mailto:DEBAARON@vms.cis.pitt.edu
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