CIHR backs down from research financing reform

ELIZABETH PAYNE, OTTAWA CITIZEN, OTTAWA CITIZEN  07.13.2016

Link to article...

Canada’s chief health science funding agency backed down Wednesday, agreeing to undo a controversial reform that led to open revolt by many of the country’s scientists.

“I think it is a big win for health research in this country,” said Bill Tholl of HealthCareCan which represents academic health science centres in Canada, at the end of the day-long meeting.

Alain Beaudet, president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, left the meeting with news that controversial changes to the peer review system — by which scientific research is selected for funding — would be undone and face to face peer review would be restored as part of a hybrid system.

“We heard the concerns of the community,” Beaudet said. “This can only work with the community on board.”

The embattled CIHR president, whose leadership has been questioned as protests to the reforms grew, called it “an extraordinary positive outcome.”

As part of sweeping reforms overseen by Beaudet, the CIHR made numerous changes to the way health research funding is selected and disseminated. The most controversial was a decision to move away from face-to-face peer review meetings, considered the gold standard around the world, in favour of an online system. Among factors in that reform, the meeting heard, was the high cost of flying reviewers to Ottawa for meetings — an estimated $2 million a year.

The new system, which was approved by CIHR’s governing council while Wednesday’s emergency meeting was under way, will be a hybrid. In the first round, reviewers will vet and eliminate weaker applications, likely through video conferencing, before meeting face-to-face to select the top applicants.

“This is how the rest of the world functions,” said Mona Nemer, vice-president of research at the University of Ottawa, of face-to-face peer review meetings, “so we are embracing what everyone else is doing.”

Health Minister Jane Philpott called the extraordinary mid-summer meeting with blunt instructions to the CIHR to regain the confidence of its scientific community.

She did not attend, but in a statement said that she was pleased it resulted in “key improvements that CIHR has agreed to implement immediately,” including a return to greater use of face-to-face peer review.

But she said it was “only a first step towards restoring a productive and respectful relationship between CIHR and Canada’s health researchers.” 

Researchers began raising concerns about the shift to a virtual peer review system before the changes were put in place. The fact that CIHR leadership persisted with “a model that was not working”, has challenged health researchers’ trust, said Jim Woodgett, director of research of the Lunenfield-Tanenbaum Research Institute.

Woodgett, who penned a letter to Philpott that was signed by more than 1,300 Canadian scientists, said the research community should be happy with the outcome of the meeting. Change was needed urgently, he said, because the next CIHR funding competition is to begin in coming weeks and “we can’t put the health research community in Canada through this flawed approach again.”

The federal government has appointed former University of Toronto president David Naylor to oversee a review of how fundamental science is supported in Canada. It is due to report by the end of the year.

There are other concerns with the way research is funded, say scientists, but those who attended Wednesday’s meeting called it a win for health research in Canada.

“Today was unprecedented in terms of how the research community came together, focused on what was best for health research to reestablish or at least begin to reestablish the trust and confidence in the peer review process,” said Tholl.