NIH Move to Centralize Peer Review Worries Some Experts

A proposal to centralize the first stage of the NIH’s peer review process has some experts concerned about cutting subject matter expertise in the name of efficiency.

Last week, the NIH announced plans to centralize its peer review process for grants, as well as cooperative agreements and research and development contracts, within its Center for Scientific Review (CSR).

Currently, CSR reviews 78% of grants, while 22% are reviewed in study sections within NIH’s Institutes and Centers (ICs), according to the NIH press release. The move would eliminate the center-based reviews “so that CSR conducts all first-level review.”

The change is expected to save more than $65 million annually, the NIH release said, mainly because reviews in the centers cost 3 times as much as they do in CSR.

CSR Director Noni Byrnes, PhD, told Science that the move could eliminate up to 300 scientific review officers at the ICs, though she noted that many of these employees will be moved to CSR.

Byrnes also said the consolidation has been in the works since last summer, prior to the arrival of the second Trump administration.

But grant recipients and one former CSR director have raised concerns about the potential change.

Richard Nakamura, PhD, who was director of CSR for more than 6 years until his retirement in 2018, told MedPage Today that efficiency was a priority under his watch — but if staff are burdened by a heavier workload, that could compromise quality.

“I thought there was a process of checks and balances which helped to ensure that the scientific review officers did their jobs fairly, the reviewers did their jobs, and the scientific community wrote the best grant applications that they can,” he said. Making a major funding cut means “you’re risking everybody lowering their standards in order to get all the grants done.”

Nakamura explained the CSR review process: scientific review officers look across all their grant applications and assign extramural scientific reviewers, who are paid small honorariums to participate. Applications are given scientific merit scores, critiqued, and subsequently handed off to the institutes to decide which applications get funded.

During Nakamura’s tenure, the ICs tended to handle the big grant applications for costly clinical studies specific to an individual institution, which he said “required special expertise” and tended to have more reviewers per case.

“Now you could say that that was duplicative … but I think it’s worthwhile to have points of comparison so that there isn’t one group that monopolizes everything,” he said.

Georges Benjamin, MD, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said centralizing peer review at the NIH is an “enormous change” and that change motivated by saving money doesn’t lead to the best results.

“This consolidation, to me, is a little bit suspect,” he said. “It will have huge implications in the ability to smoothly and quickly do research.” Benjamin also pointed out the agency will likely lose vital subject matter experts in this process, a worry that other experts echoed.

“One of the concerns is would there be the expertise to review these more focused funding opportunities in a more general purpose study section?” said David Erle, MD, professor and associate chair for biomedical research at the University of California San Francisco department of medicine.

“Centralization of the peer reviews that were being done by ICs sounds fine on paper,” commented Steffanie Strathdee, PhD, of the division of infectious diseases and global public health at UC San Diego Health Sciences. “However, sometimes generalists don’t understand the complexities of the science being proposed so it would be important for the NIH to evaluate these changes carefully – perhaps as a pilot program — before this becomes institutionalized.”

However, Robert Schooley, MD, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California San Diego who previously served as a member and a chair of standing study sections within CSR and institute-based study sections, reiterated that most grant applications are already processed through CSR.

“I actually prefer the CSR-based standing study section model,” he said, citing strengths like being composed of members with diverse expertise serving fixed terms speaking candidly about applications. But when special expertise not present on the CSR committee is needed, he recommended it be “supplemented with ad hoc reviewers” for that particular application.

According to the release, the NIH’s proposal to centralize peer review is “under review with implementation pending external review” which will include review by HHS, Office of Management and Budget, providing Congress with a 15-day notification period, and a notice on the Federal Register.

Cheryl Clark contributed reporting to this story.

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