Evidence of meeting #112 for Science and Research in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was excellence.
A video is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Maxime Blanchette-Joncas Bloc Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
I would like to hear your views on an approach already tried outside the country, such as in New Zealand, where the Health Research Council introduced a random funding model in 2015. The Swiss National Science Foundation and even private foundations have done the same.
Would it be possible to grant funding on a random basis to avoid the need for peer review?
Co-Founder, Retraction Watch
It's a very interesting idea, and I've read some of the coverage of that as well as a few studies of what has happened after that.
I think it's in the early days, so like everything else, we should be empirical. We should ensure that a pilot program is really tested and that we look carefully at the evidence with a clear eye.
On the other hand, we've also seen evidence that peer reviewers—and I'm talking here about grant reviewers, in other words, grant peer reviewers—often don't do any better if you were to measure impact later on, or even citations, as flawed a metric as that is. They don't do any better than a random selection. That, to me, is somewhat troubling. However, it would also argue for perhaps trying that as a system, at least for maybe some percentage. Maybe it's a pilot program.
I also want to recommend the work and the writing of someone named Stuart Buck. He's at the Good Science Project, and he has done a lot of really smart thinking about a lot of these issues, in particular about grant review—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
I'm sorry, maybe you could.... We're almost running out of resources.
We'll now turn to MP Cannings for two and a half minutes, please.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Thank you.
I'm going to turn to Ms. Evans. You represent Research Canada, a health research alliance. You mentioned that, increasingly, health research has become more international, more collaborative. How would the federal government measure the excellence of those projects?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Research Canada: An Alliance for Health Discovery
Research across all domains is sort of a global endeavour, and researchers collaborate beyond geographic boundaries as they attempt to answer very complicated questions. That is why I mentioned that the way we consider research excellence needs to be broad, and it needs to be tailored and evolving. It changes as science does and as society does.
I'm really pleased in the case of health, when we think about the populations that health research and clinical research in particular are meant to serve, that clinical trials and other types of research think about the people we want to have as benefactors and about the impacts we want to have. That's really important.
I think the same principles apply to the kinds of things we have talked about already at this meeting. We need to think about ethics. We need to think about integrity. Openness has come through as being a very important theme today. It's important for people to understand that what they're doing, and their results, will be open and public so that these can be scrutinized and can be shared, and people can build on what's being learned.
We also need to make sure that the knowledge is being translated. This was mentioned by some of my fellow presenters today. There is the need to move ideas through to commercialize changes that we then put into the health care system or that are taken by companies, and there is a need for Canadians to get access to these things in a timely and affordable way.
I hope that answers your question.
NDP
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
Okay, that's great.
Thank you very much to our witnesses. If there's something you wanted to mention and didn't get a chance to cover in your testimony today, you may submit it in writing to the clerk.
I want to thank you for your participation.
I do want to inform the committee that I will be presenting to the House, this Thursday, our report on funding of post-secondary institutions.
Also, Thursday, December 5, is our deadline for submitting our witnesses for the antimicrobial study.
We'll meet again on Thursday.
Is it the will of the committee to adjourn this meeting?
I'm sorry. Yes, Mr. Blanchette-Joncas.
Bloc
Maxime Blanchette-Joncas Bloc Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC
Madam Chair, when you table the report on Thursday, will there be a press release?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Valerie Bradford
It's quite extensive. I think you'll like it. It's very detailed. The analysts did a good job.
Thank you very much, everyone. It was a great meeting today.
The meeting is adjourned.