Funding, News and Announcements

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past two years CIHR has reformed their granting programs and peer review system. These reforms, coupled with the low levels of funding success rates and fewer competitions, many of us believe, have had a negative impact on the Canadian health research community. The concerns in the research community has also been reported in international, national and municipal news outlets such as:

CBC
Ottawa citizen
Science Magazine

These concerns have now lead to an emergency meeting called by the Minister of Health to listen to the concerns raised by researchers on the new CIHR on the peer review system.

We are interested in understanding how these recent CIHR reforms may have affected your ability to conduct research and as such are asking you to please take the time to fill out this survey (220 people have completed this already). The data will be used to quantitatively assess the current situation our research community is facing. Liisa Galea, at the University of British Columbia, is collecting these data and will collate the report.  

Furthermore there are two online letter/petitions that offer you the chance to add your voice:

• The Canadian Society for Molecular Biosciences has just started an online petition to demand that CIHR returns to face-to-face peer review for the fall competitions, and that the Science review panel requires this as standard for tricouncil funding - a fallback plan if no action should be taken for the fall.
• There is also an excellent letter by Jim Woodgett many people (over 1200) have signed already. If you have not signed the Woodgett letter and would like to, it can be viewed here. For this letter, you simply insert your name and affiliation into the online document and the author will accept the changes after reviewing them.