NIH Comment Portal on Grant-Score Proposal Stopped Accepting Submissions Before Deadline, Scientists Say

Since the NIH floated a plan to hide grant impact scores from applicants and sort proposals into three broad tiers, the public comment window has run from August to a deadline of Tuesday, Oct. 13. Now some of the people who wanted to weigh in say they never got the chance.

Several scientists posted on social media that the portal stopped accepting comments hours before the deadline. An archived version of the comment page lists the cutoff as "11:59:59 P.M. EST [sic]" on Oct. 13.

Joshua Weitz, a biology professor at the University of Maryland, told Scientific American he tried to reach the site before midnight and could not.

What the proposal would change

Grant scores are averaged measures of a research project's predicted outcomes, set by a panel of experts. Under the proposed change, applications would be sorted into three broad categories of merit. The overall score would stay secret.

That affects what both funding applicants and NIH program officers can see. Some researchers have said the change could open the grant approval process to undue political influence.

This is taxpayer money. The NIH funds research with public dollars, and the scoring system is how the public's money gets sorted into winners and losers. A rule that makes that sorting harder to see is exactly the kind of change that should get a full public airing.

What the NIH has said

The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has not said whether the portal closed early, why, or whether comments submitted late or not at all will be counted.

The account of an early shutdown comes from scientists' own reports of failed attempts, not from any NIH statement or technical log. A server glitch, a scheduled time-zone cutoff or something else could explain it. The agency has not said which.

What is established is the deadline the page listed and the fact that people who say they tried to comment before it were unable to.

Not the first fight over NIH grant control

The scoring proposal follows an earlier effort this year to have political appointees, rather than independent expert panels, decide who receives federal science grants. That idea drew significant backlash. It was put on hold until at least December after Congress rejected the change.

The two proposals are separate. Both go to the same question: who has the final say over which research gets funded, and how much of that process the public and applicants can see.

What comes next

The open question is whether the NIH will reopen the portal or accept comments that scientists say they could not file. Federal agencies generally have to consider the public comments they receive before finalizing a rule. A record that people say was cut short invites a challenge if the NIH moves ahead.

The agency has not announced a date for a final decision on the three-tier scoring system. The earlier appointee-decides-grants proposal remains on hold until at least December. Scientific American's editors have flagged the story as developing.