Inside the Battle Over OMB’s Shocking Proposed Rule Changes: How Top US Chefs Are Fighting Back on Research Funding
- Prohibition of Using Federal Funds for Covered Foreign Collaborations. Research is, by its nature, a global endeavor. Efforts to make the world a better place for everyone — through healthcare developments, technical innovations, archaeological findings, and more — necessarily involve bringing together the best and brightest minds globally. In some disciplines, such as physics, research projects routinely involve literally thousands of contributors from hundreds of institutions around the world. Placing restrictions on American researchers’ ability to collaborate internationally won’t just affect our international partners; it will result in the U.S. losing its long-held position as world leader in science and scholarship.
- Conferences; and Memberships, Subscriptions, and Professional Activity Costs. These two proposed changes, like the one above, run completely counter to how research is, and always has been, conducted. Science and scholarship can’t thrive in a vacuum, and research is iterative. Researchers need to engage with each other in order to share and get feedback on their hypotheses and early findings, which then enables them to refine and successfully complete their work. Conferences, memberships, and other professional activities are where and how that engagement occurs. Limiting participation based on political, rather than scientific, merit will likewise limit researchers’ ability to produce timely and rigorous research that incorporates community input ahead of the formal peer review process.
I sincerely hope that, as a reader of The Scholarly Kitchen, you (and your organizations) will also submit your comments if you haven’t already done so. It’s vital that we all make our voices heard.
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