Minister calls emergency meeting to address revolt over CIHR's new peer review system

Health minister Jane Philpott has requested that the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) hold an emergency meeting — tentatively slated for July 13 — to deal with the persistent and growing revolt among senior health researchers over the granting council's recently implemented peer review process for awarding research grants.

Philpott issued a terse statement July 5 asking CIHR to "convene a working meeting in the very near future with key representatives of the research community, including those who have raised this issue publicly". She was responding to a June 27th letter penned by Dr Jim Woodgett, director of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and signed by more than 1,200 scientists in advance of the upcoming Project Scheme competition set to begin in August.

Woodgett's letter says the current system is a "failed experiment" and in "imminent crisis", stating that the new peer review process contains "deep flaws and erroneous assumptions". Of particular concern is the adoption of an online peer review system that replaces face-to-face meetings with virtual adjudication.

The open letter and call for a meeting is only the latest escalation in blowback from the health research community over CIHR's peer review reforms. In an interview with Dr Alain Beaudet earlier this year , the CIHR president was firm in his support for the new system, stating: "I stand by what we were doing. I think it's been well done. It's been managed as well as we humanely could. We had to transition from one to the other." (R$, January 26/16).

In a July 5 statement following Philpott's request for a meeting, Beaudet's tone changed.

"The online system implemented to ensure an unbiased and tailored evaluation of each research proposal has raised serious concerns among applicants and reviewers alike. These concerns must be addressed since CIHR can only be successful if it has the support and confidence of the research community," stated Beaudet.

Beaudet also announced that "funding opportunities for our investigator-initiated programs (originally scheduled for June 30) are being delayed until after the working meeting has taken place", adding that CIHR intends to "maintain the original application deadlines and funding dates".

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