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Access through your institution Buy or subscribe TO THE EDITOR — Researchers are spending an increasing fraction of their time applying for funding. However, despite extensive efforts

invested in applications and evaluations, the current funding system appears to largely fail in its task of reliably ranking the relative research quality of proposals1,2,3. Hence, the

current funding system to a considerable degree represents a lottery — and a strikingly inefficient one at that4,5,6. These observations raise a more general question: of whether the

benefits of current funding schemes outweigh their costs, on both the individual and societal level. At first glance, any initiative that provides resources for research seems to be

beneficial to research and society. However, writing grant proposals reduces the time that is available for research, and the sum of these opportunity costs has to be weighed against the sum

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calculated during checkout ADDITIONAL ACCESS OPTIONS: * Log in * Learn about institutional subscriptions * Read our FAQs * Contact customer support REFERENCES * Kaplan, D., Lacetera, N.

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INFORMATION AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS * Die Junge Akademie, Berlin, Germany Martin Dresler, Eva Buddeberg, Ulrike Endesfelder, Jan Haaker, Christian Hof, Robert Kretschmer, Dirk Pflüger &

 Fabian Schmidt * Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Martin Dresler * Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany Eva Buddeberg * Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms

Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany Ulrike Endesfelder * University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany Jan Haaker * Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany Christian

Hof * Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany Robert Kretschmer * University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany Dirk Pflüger * Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany

Fabian Schmidt Authors * Martin Dresler View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Eva Buddeberg View author publications You can also search for

this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Ulrike Endesfelder View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Jan Haaker View author publications You can

also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Christian Hof View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Robert Kretschmer View author

publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Dirk Pflüger View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Fabian Schmidt

View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar CORRESPONDING AUTHOR Correspondence to Martin Dresler. ETHICS DECLARATIONS COMPETING INTERESTS The

authors declare no competing interests. RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Dresler, M., Buddeberg, E., Endesfelder, U. _et al._ Why many

funding schemes harm rather than support research. _Nat Hum Behav_ 6, 607–608 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01286-3 Download citation * Published: 31 January 2022 * Issue Date:

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