Applying for time to use telescopes, synchrotron light sources, nanofabrication labs, and other shared research facilities can be fraught. “It drives a lot of discussion and angst,” says Mike Dunne, SLAC associate laboratory director and head of the Linac Coherent Light Source, the lab’s free-electron laser. “The oversubscription rate is high, and no system is perfect.”
Many publicly funded facilities are open to scientists from around the world. Demand to access many of them is rising and acceptance rates are correspondingly slipping. Evaluating the large numbers of proposals has become a growing challenge.
In efforts to increase fairness and efficiency, facility and program managers are tweaking, testing, and studying variations on traditional time-allocation procedures. Changes include requiring that applicants commit to reviewing other proposals, using machine learning to assign proposals to reviewers, and making peer review anonymous. Studies on the effectiveness of hybrid and remote panels, scoring schemes, review length,...
