TY - JOUR
T1 - Broad impacts and narrow perspectives
T2 - Passing the buck on science and social impacts
AU - Bozeman, Barry
AU - Boardman, Craig
N1 - Funding Information:
Science Policy; National Science Foundation; Broader Impacts; Peer Review
Funding Information:
We begin with a paean to legality and formalism. The most important response to the “then what” question is to follow the line of political authority that begins with citizens endowing elected public officials to act upon their behalf, and with elected public officials delegating authority in this regard to administrative policy-makers working in such publicly funded institutions as the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and NSF. Even in the best of cases, political authority is fragmented for every public policy domain, including science policy, and the shirking of political responsibility is commonplace. Passing along a political mission—ensuring that publicly funded science serves desired policy goals—to scientists, who often have no relevant knowledge and for whom there is no political accountability, seems wrongheaded. NSF employees are public officials who are held politically accountable by, among others, their superiors in their agency, by Congressional oversight and funding committees, and by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Even visiting programme assistant “rotators”, who are short-terms destined to return soon to their university-based careers, are nonetheless responsible public officials. If NSF officials (or OMB, or Congress, or Office of Science and Technology Policy officials) believe, for example, that research should support diversity or that high school students should tour labs funded with public money, then let them create (additional) policies to achieve these objectives. Relying on academic researchers seeking funding to somehow channel these desires and express them in their proposals could hardly be a more circuitous route to public interest-based science policies. The only approach that would seem to increase the fecklessness of such an approach would be to have those same scientists, acting in a different role, be charged with predicting the value and social benefits from these unguided, poorly rationalized, and undocumented “broader impacts”.
PY - 2009/7
Y1 - 2009/7
N2 - We provide a critical assessment of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) "broader impacts criterion" for peer review, which has met with resistance from the scientific community and been characterized as unlikely to have much positive effect due to poor implementation and adherence to the linear model heuristic for innovation. In our view, the weakness of NSF's approach owes less to these issues than to the misguided assumption that the peer review process can be used to leverage more societal value from research. This idea, although undoubtedly well-meaning, is fundamentally flawed. Retooling or refining the Broader Impacts Criterion does not alter the fact that conventional peer review, based on specialized scientific and technical expertise, is not up to the task of ensuring adequate judgements about social impact. We consider some possible alternative approaches to providing greater social impact in science and include in our assessment past and current efforts at NSF and throughout the federal research establishment that address, in some cases having addressed for decades, the intentions and goals of the Broader Impacts Criterion, albeit using alternate mechanisms. We conclude that institution-building and explicit and targeted policy-making are more useful and democratically legitimate approaches to ensuring broad social impacts.
AB - We provide a critical assessment of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) "broader impacts criterion" for peer review, which has met with resistance from the scientific community and been characterized as unlikely to have much positive effect due to poor implementation and adherence to the linear model heuristic for innovation. In our view, the weakness of NSF's approach owes less to these issues than to the misguided assumption that the peer review process can be used to leverage more societal value from research. This idea, although undoubtedly well-meaning, is fundamentally flawed. Retooling or refining the Broader Impacts Criterion does not alter the fact that conventional peer review, based on specialized scientific and technical expertise, is not up to the task of ensuring adequate judgements about social impact. We consider some possible alternative approaches to providing greater social impact in science and include in our assessment past and current efforts at NSF and throughout the federal research establishment that address, in some cases having addressed for decades, the intentions and goals of the Broader Impacts Criterion, albeit using alternate mechanisms. We conclude that institution-building and explicit and targeted policy-making are more useful and democratically legitimate approaches to ensuring broad social impacts.
KW - Broader Impacts
KW - National Science Foundation
KW - Peer Review
KW - Science Policy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=74249122915&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1080/02691720903364019
DO - 10.1080/02691720903364019
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:74249122915
VL - 23
SP - 183
EP - 198
JO - Social Epistemology
JF - Social Epistemology
SN - 0269-1728
IS - 3-4
ER -