From the:
…comes this press release that makes me wonder why the University of Virginia spent close to a half million dollars trying to keep Dr. Michael Mann’s emails out of an FOIA request and lawsuit by the State attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli and the American Tradition Institute. I think with this new revelation of apparently widespread funding duplication in science, and the active reticence to produce those emails demonstrated by UVA, the justification to see those emails has now increased.
“… over the past two decades funding agencies may have awarded millions and possibly billions of dollars to scientists who submitted the same grant request multiple times — and accepted duplicate funding.”
I’m sure that if there is no issue, UVA will work quickly to put the issue at rest. It may be nothing, and there may be no duplication of any kind, but it would benefit everyone involved to put all the UVA email issues to rest. As it says in the Nature article: “There is no implication that McIntire or any of the other researchers connected to the cases in this news story committed any wrongdoing.”. However, I don’t think that “academic freedom” ensures full autonomy with grant money. Grant recipients are still beholden to the issuing agency and the taxpayer. I’m sure if nothing else, this revelation will cause some additional investigations, and if there was any grant duplication at UVA, it can likely be determined independently as the authors have demonstrated, and confirmed with grant papers and emails.
Scientists may have received millions in duplicate funding
Virginia Tech scientists use text-mining software to find cases of duplicate funding
Big Data computation at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech reveals that over the past two decades funding agencies may have awarded millions and possibly billions of dollars to scientists who submitted the same grant request multiple times — and accepted duplicate funding.
An analysis led by Harold R. Garner, a professor at Virginia Tech, not only indicates that millions in funding may have been granted and used inappropriately, it points to techniques to uncover existing instances of duplicate funding and ways to prevent it in the future. The analysis was presented in the comment section of this week’s Nature.
Submitting applications with identical or highly similar specific aims, goals, objectives, and hypotheses is allowed; however, accepting duplicate funding for the same project is not.
To estimate the extent of double-funding, Garner and his team, including programmer Lauren McIver, systematically compared 858,717 funded grant and contract summaries using text-similarity (text mining) software followed up by manual review.
These summaries were downloaded from public websites in the U.S. for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
Although the researchers could not definitively determine whether the similar grants were true duplicates — this would require access to the full grant files, which were not publicly available — they found strong evidence that tens of millions of dollars may have been spent on grants where at least a portion was already being funded. In the most recent five years (2007-2011), they identified 39 similar grant pairs involving more than $20 million.
“It is quite possible that our detection software missed many cases of duplication,” Garner said. “If text similarity software misses as many cases of funding duplications as it does plagiarism of scientific papers we’ve studied, then the extent of duplication could be much larger. It could be as much as 2.5 percent of total research funding, equivalent to $5.1 billion since 1985.”
Co-researcher and medical science ethicist Michael B. Waitzkin said, “In line with the Government Accountability Office report issued February 2012, these findings suggest the research community should undertake a more thorough investigation of the true extent of duplication and establish, clearer and more consistent guidance and coordination of grant and contract funding across agencies, both public and private.”
The researchers did not reveal specific principal investigators or research organizations identified as double-dippers, but said that no instances of double dipping were found at Virginia Tech.
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Source: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-scientists-millions-duplicate-funding.html
Nature article: http://www.nature.com/news/funding-agencies-urged-to-check-for-duplicate-grants-1.12317
Note: In the Nature article the lead paragraph starts off with:
When neuroscientist Steven McIntire of the University of California, San Francisco, submitted a five-year, US$1.6-million grant application to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in November 2001, he did not mention that just five months earlier, the US Army had awarded him $1.2 million for a project with strikingly similar scientific aims.
Readers should note that this is NOT Steve McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, the operator of the skeptic website Climate Audit.
If anyone could get to the bottom of this, McIver certainly could!
*:)*
Maybe Anthony can set up a second Web site, call it MuttsUpWithThat or something, post the same stories there as here, and get twice the number of Big Oil checks!
On second thought…
What a surprise if it turns out that the scientists and administrators involved in these things just “happened” to pay themselves a duplicate salary from the duplicate funding. That would just be an honest mistake, easy for anyone to make, right?
My God, the thievery. The more we delve into this, the uglier it becomes. The uglier it becomes, the more pressing it is to have full disclosure. It’s the ringing of one alarm bell after another, drawing more and more attention until something is done. It’s good to see this massive scam unravelling.
A light bulb moment?
I have been baffled by the silence of the academic experts toward the climate-gate revelations.
But if the corruption is shared by the group,then light will be shunned, correction avoided.
“… funding agencies may have awarded millions and possibly billions of dollars to scientists’ for duplicate studies.”
Stop your howling Anthony; we all know the Trillions in $$$$, you and Dog are raking in from tapping into multiple pockets of Big Oil! 😉
/sarc
but said that no instances of double dipping were found at Virginia Tech.
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“Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.”
“As it says in the Nature article: “There is no implication that McIntire or any of the other researchers connected to the cases…”
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HUH??? Don’t the propagandist ever rest? The only reason that McIntire’s name appears in this paragraph, which otherwise makes absolutely no sense, is because it would not due to have the Manniacs name in the same paragraph were researcher wrong doing is being discussed. It could produce unintentional connections in the cognition of students who are still undergoing indoctrination.
“Readers should note that this is NOT Steve McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, the operator of the skeptic website Climate Audit.”
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Um nevermind ….
Am I the only person who thought ‘Tell me something I didn’t know’ when I read this? Seriously – we are all aware of the stupidity and wide ranging inefficacy of the public-funded AGW memed research. FFS, if the research was that good, with that much funding, surely the science would be settled (/sarc?).
I am now curious as to how much as been spent on cancer research, or anti-malaria research, etc just for a comparison?
“University of Virginia spent close to a half million dollars trying to keep Dr. Michael Mann’s emails out of an FOIA request and lawsuit by the State attorney general, …”
Does this possibly point to a certain mann getting paid to molest GW data, and getting paid to torture GW data?
Having worked with and for federal agencies for decades, nothing surprises me.
I am sure the legal beagles involved already followed this path, but has anyone asked for a FOIA on the complete email account of the Grant Administrator? Sometimes its not the Big tree that starts a forest fire, but a little tree with lots of duff under its limbs that fuel the forest fire. A grant administrator email account makes for an interesting place to find loose strings.
They used text comparison software to analyze grant report summaries. This hardly is a rigorous review considering the fact that many research programs are a series of similar studies with each successive one following up on detail or extending into unsampled areas (geographic regions, populations, time periods). Thus it’s quite likely summaries would have similar text yet be perfectly legitimate and separate studies. Furthermore, universities have separate research grant accounting offices to comply with federal regulations and which are subject to separate audits. Also there’s much competition for funding (about 1 in 5 applications is funded, IIRC) so it’s hard to justify a total replication without complaints coming from the competitors who didn’t get funded. don’t doubt that researchers network and know what’s going on and lobby for their projects through back channels.
That being said, there have been cases of fraud taking place so oversight is necessary. This report just sounds a little too breathless to not have a skeptical eye turned on it.
Both VA and the US have the False Claims Act for which violations can result in draconian sentences and recapture liability. The VA FCA is the law being used to by the VA AG to investigate Michael Mann.
I can see funding different people to research the same questions as a cross check (there is too little of attempting to duplicate results). But not the same people.
“Maybe Anthony can set up a second Web site, call it MuttsUpWithThat”
No, then he would get inundated with complaints from dog lovers about the lack of dog related stories. 🙂
Is anyone really surprised?
Va. Tech would love nothing better than to harpoon UVA – but then UVA seems to be exposing itself to the practice.
The obvious unanswered question: Did they get the same results ?
I’m not sure how it works in the US but in the UK it’s common, and in many cases mandatory, for anyone who’s involved in a grant funded project but not 100% full time dedicated (i.e. as well as eligible activity – activity as outlined in the grant application – but who also engages in ineligible activity – activity not related to the grant application) has to keep a timesheet which can then be reconciled to payroll records.
This prevents grant awarding bodies from paying recipients from using the grant for things that the awarding agency didn’t intend.
It also highlights people who work rather too many hours and prevents multiple agencies for paying for the same person at the same time.
Simple and quite effective.
So did Cuccinelli ask someone at VT to check this?
It does bring together why they talk about a ‘Doubling of CO2’ and a ‘Doubling of Warming’ – it seems that it could be said they might arrive at that due to a doubling of income?
There is a DoulbleMint Gum prank in this somewhere. Or a Josh Cartoon.
I would like to see a requirement that the funding be described in the abstract of any paper published.
So, the Government sets out the overflowing troughs and all the little piggies come along and shove their snouts deep into them.
Is anyone surprised?