Funding Decisions

Background

In support of its mission, NIH implemented an agency-wide approach for Leveraging Institute, Center, and Office (ICO) Funding Policies. All the ICOs use a consistent set of core tenets for their funding policies to ensure that the NIH mission and health priorities are being achieved. Read more in the NIH Extramural Nexus article.

NIH’s unified funding policy Core Tenets:

All ICO funding policies should:

• Align with the NIH's mission
• Prioritize scientific merit; ICOs should consider peer review information in its entirety
• Integrate a breadth of topics and approaches relevant to the ICO’s priorities
• Consider investigator career stage and promote sustainability of the biomedical research workforce
• Promote broad distribution and geographic balance of funding, considering the total amount and type of NIH funding already available to each investigator
• Align with the availability of ICO funds

How Peer Review Outcomes are Considered

Through the peer review process, NIH seeks to ensure that applications for funding receive fair, independent, expert, and timely scientific reviews—free from inappropriate influences—so that NIH can fund the most promising research.

ICOs will continue to consider the scores and critiques received during peer review alongside several other factors when making funding recommendations (e.g., strategic plans, etc.) that inform ICOs on how to appropriately develop pay plans to fulfill these goals.

Some ICOs previously set paylines based in part on peer review scores that were used in rank order, beyond which most applications were not funded. As part of the wider Unified Funding approach, ICOs will no longer employ these cutoff points in overall impact scores to determine which applications to fund. Payline funding decisions use only the overall impact score, without necessarily considering additional valuable information provided by peer review. Moving forward, ICOs will consider peer review information in its entirety when assessing scientific merit.

Learn more about NIH’s first level of peer review.

How Advisory Council Recommendations are Used

Advisory councils perform the second level of peer review process for applications. Their duties include:

• Offer recommendations on policy and program development, program implementation, evaluation, and other matters of significance to the ICO mission
• Assist ICOs in identifying cases in which further investment in a particular area or principal investigator is not justifiable relative to competing priorities

Learn more about NIH’s second level of peer review.

Who Makes Funding Decisions

IC Directors will continue to have the delegated authority to decide what is funded by their ICOs. In addition to the core tenets for funding policies, IC Directors will carefully consider the budget to award for each grant, not relying solely on the requested budget as evaluated by peer reviewers, but also assessing the actual needs, opportunity costs, and stewardship of taxpayer investments.

Application Success Rates

NIH publishes success rates that provide higher level insights into the likelihood an application will be funded. Success rates are calculated by dividing the number of awards made in a fiscal year by the number of applications received. Applications having one or more resubmissions in the same fiscal year are only counted once.