"A New Funding Model for Scientists"

“The current academic funding system, which allocates public money to researchers based on the submission and peer review of countless research proposals, has served science well—but some people believe that the time has come to find more efficient ways to distribute the money. Among them is a group of scientists at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington, who proposed a new funding model in an article published last week in EMBO reports… Here’s how it works. Each year, funding agencies give an equal amount of funding to all scientists, unconditionally. The scientists are then required to reallocate a fixed percentage of all the funding they received in the previous year to other researchers, based on who they think would use the money best. Researchers' total funding, then, would consist of basal funding directly from a funding agency plus donations from other researchers who value their work.”

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2014_01_13/caredit.a1400012