washington

Procedures for grant applications to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will remain unchanged for now, even though the agency is in the process of overhauling its peer-review system.

According to Wendy Baldwin, deputy director for extramural research at NIH, which distributes more than $5 billion a year in grants, there will be no substantial changes to the application forms used by external scientists for up to two years, as it is planned to combine them with the launch of a new system of electronic applications.

Until then, said Baldwin, “the astute applicant is going to be more up front about these features in what they write”. This is a reference to five new criteria for judging grant proposals, announced by Harold Varmus, the NIH director, last month.

The five criteria are: significance, approach, innovation, investigator and environment. For now, they will simply be outlined in the instructions to applicants that accompany application forms. In these, “it will be clear” to applicants what the criteria are, Varmus said last week.

One of the five criteria has proved controversial: the demand for “innovation”. As outlined by Varmus last month, peer-reviewers will ask of an application: “Does the project employ novel concepts, approaches or methods? Are the aims original and innovative? Does the project challenge existing paradigms or develop new methodologies or technologies?”

Some scientists complain that the “innovation” criterion will work unfairly against clinical researchers. But others back it strongly, most prominently among these Keith Yamamoto, a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who chairs the panel that advises the NIH's Division of Research Grants.

The NIH is also overhauling its system of peer review, with changes likely in structure, membership and subject areas of study sections. The effort is being led by Elvera Ehrenfeld, a molecular biologist from the University of California, Irvine, who is the new head of the Division of Research Grants. She expects to propose a reorganization within 18 months.