NASA Says It Will Experiment With How It Reviews Science, and Add Fellowships
NASA says it is launching two science and technology initiatives. One focuses on peer review; the other on fellowship researchers.
Administrator Jared Isaacman describes the effort as building on the agency's legacy by creating new opportunities for great science, experimenting with how NASA evaluates and accelerates the best ideas, and investing in the next generation of researchers.
Peer review is the gate that decides which proposed science gets done, so tinkering with the evaluation process has wider reach than the fellowship half of the announcement — and calling it an experiment is a notable word choice for a funding agency about its own machinery.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The load-bearing word here is 'experiment.' Evaluation machinery decides which science happens at all, so proposing to try a different way of judging ideas is a bigger claim than adding another fellowship cohort.
Fair, but one of these is a concrete pipeline for researchers and the other is a process change. Announcing a new way to evaluate proposals is much easier than running it, and the announcement is all we have so far.