"CSR Announces Winners of its America COMPETES Challenges to Maximize Fairness in NIH Peer Review"

“The NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR) has revealed the winners of its two America

COMPETE Act challenges to help identify new methods to detect bias in peer review and

identify strategies to strengthen fairness and impartiality in peer review. This effort to

study the possibility of bias is part of a much larger NIH effort to respond to the study that

showed Black applicants for NIH grants do not fare as well as White applicants after

researchers controlled for various factors.”

http://public.csr.nih.gov/Documents/LearnMoreabouttheWinningIdeas.pdf

This is really cool, and the paragraph-long proposal descriptions are worth reading.

I’m not super convinced by the last one, the pledge, because I doubt that most people walk into the room intending to be biased and most probably avidly consider themselves non-racist and not requiring any kind of intervention. In my dreamland, every potential reviewer would have to take an IAT or something first in order to observe their own biases, and then be presented with some quick thought process to help them process and be aware while reviewing.