Lawrence PA (2009) Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research. PLoS Biol 7(9): e1000197. [link]
In general, researchers are allowed to pay for salaries of post-docs and technicians as well as reagents and equipments necessary for their own research from the research grant they acquired. This article describes a hypothetical researcher “K” who is young and talented and successfully acquired a large research grant. K hires a post-doc, a technician and a graduate student, and sets up his own lab. As is often the case, however, this grant is also only for three years. In order to maintain the lab, he needs to apply for other grants in the middle of the period. Since they are usually very competitive and accepts very few proposals, K has to apply for multiple grants and he wastes his time only for writing proposals which could be used for experiments otherwise. To make matters worse, they are not funded and his research life gets into a vicious circle.
I am ignorant about the time and energy Japanese researchers use for writing grant proposals. Since granting system in Japan seems much simpler than those of Europe and US, the situation in Japan would be less severe. On the other hand, considering the large energy consumed by many of the European and US researchers like K, selection system of European and US grants would be quite fair and is based purely on the proposals. I wonder how it would be for the Japanese system.
