Theoretical research without projects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel funding scheme for theoretical research based on past productivity rather than project proposals, demonstrating convergence to optimal productivity and robustness against manipulation.

Contribution

It proposes a new funding policy based on scientific productivity, analyzes its convergence properties, and proves its resistance to cheating by individual units.

Findings

Policies converge to near-optimal productivity in the limit of many calls.

Numerical simulations show robustness against statistical noise.

One policy is proven to be cheat-proof.

Abstract

We propose a funding scheme for theoretical research that does not rely on project proposals, but on recent past scientific productivity. Given a quantitative figure of merit on the latter and the total research budget, we introduce a number of policies to decide the allocation of funds in each grant call. Under some assumptions on scientific productivity, some of such policies are shown to converge, in the limit of many grant calls, to a funding configuration that is close to the maximum total productivity of the whole scientific community. We present numerical simulations showing evidence that these schemes would also perform well in the presence of statistical noise in the scientific productivity and/or its evaluation. Finally, we prove that one of our policies cannot be cheated by individual research units. Our work must be understood as a first step towards a mathematical theory of the research activity.