Great article! You’ve convinced me that National Labs are closer to FROs than your typical government research orgs. I’ve been trying to map and categorize these alternative structures for research institutes here: https://structuresforresearch.com
The pressures to publish and apply for grants were my main reasons for grouping it that way, though maybe the pressures are much lower than I had thought.
Fraunhofer and Helmholtz research centers in Germany are similarly under represented in the metascience discourse and IMO warrant more analyses on the impact of their structures / incentives / outcomes.
That’s a great compendium of models. National Labs live in tension with “publish or perish”. I allude to it in the piece. They shouldn’t, but their most visible currency remains papers, unfortunately. They can drive internal status, even if formal pressures are lower than at universities. That’s part of what needs to be analyzed more carefully.
I wonder if the issue will always be access to government resources - even internally there are probably problems with access to the use of equipment (depending on what it is) and for "outsiders" there is an additional problem of prioritisation - who gets first call on the equipment/lab, how much does access cost, how long do you have to wait?
> National Lab scientists must cover their salaries from research grants. A small fraction are centralized at the Lab level and have a long-term commitment (so-called “hard money”), but most scientists today are on “soft money,” meaning that they have to compete for grants lasting 3-5 years just like faculty at universities.
This is a relatively modern situation; historically, most lab scientists did not have to worry about grants. This has definitely pushed labs to act more like, and compete with, university research groups. This will always happen to some extent, because a lot of people move back and forth between the different institutes over the course of their careers. But the focus on short-term funding negates a substantial amount of the labs' comparative advantage.
Great article! You’ve convinced me that National Labs are closer to FROs than your typical government research orgs. I’ve been trying to map and categorize these alternative structures for research institutes here: https://structuresforresearch.com
The pressures to publish and apply for grants were my main reasons for grouping it that way, though maybe the pressures are much lower than I had thought.
Fraunhofer and Helmholtz research centers in Germany are similarly under represented in the metascience discourse and IMO warrant more analyses on the impact of their structures / incentives / outcomes.
That’s a great compendium of models. National Labs live in tension with “publish or perish”. I allude to it in the piece. They shouldn’t, but their most visible currency remains papers, unfortunately. They can drive internal status, even if formal pressures are lower than at universities. That’s part of what needs to be analyzed more carefully.
I wonder if the issue will always be access to government resources - even internally there are probably problems with access to the use of equipment (depending on what it is) and for "outsiders" there is an additional problem of prioritisation - who gets first call on the equipment/lab, how much does access cost, how long do you have to wait?
> National Lab scientists must cover their salaries from research grants. A small fraction are centralized at the Lab level and have a long-term commitment (so-called “hard money”), but most scientists today are on “soft money,” meaning that they have to compete for grants lasting 3-5 years just like faculty at universities.
This is a relatively modern situation; historically, most lab scientists did not have to worry about grants. This has definitely pushed labs to act more like, and compete with, university research groups. This will always happen to some extent, because a lot of people move back and forth between the different institutes over the course of their careers. But the focus on short-term funding negates a substantial amount of the labs' comparative advantage.