A Response to the NIH RFI " Sustaining the Biomedical Workforce and a Potential Emeritus Award for Senior Researchers"

Abstract

The NIH issued a Request for Information (NOT-OD-15-064) (NIH, 2015a) looking for responses by March 6 th on a proposal for an "emeritus award" allowing senior investigators to transition out of running a lab and perhaps pass the projects to a junior investigator. Citing calls from the community for such an award (FASEB, 2015), Sally Rockey's "Rock Talk" blog post, "Seeking Your Input on Sustaining the Workforce Through an Emeritus Award" (Rockey, 2015) provided a forum for discussion, with further analysis in other venues (Berg, 2015a; Drugmonkey, 2015). The proposal received press coverage at the time in Nature (Deng, 2015), and subsequently in an article on "The Retirement Debate" (Scudellari, 2015) where the "emeritus award" was described as having "met with overwhelming disapproval". Or was it? Jeremy Berg subsequently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the response to the RFI on the "emeritus" award (Berg, 2015b), after rumors circulated that the response was more positive than what was publicly perceived. Responses were received from only 195 individuals, and 3 scientific societies; less than 200 entities in all of the U.S. biomedical research system (Berg, 2015c). Berg has provided some preliminary analysis (Berg, 2015c) from the primary data (with names, but not institutions, redacted (Berg, 2105d); direct link to the data here), as well as the observation that an "emeritus" award renamed as a "Capstone" award has been included in a reading of the 21 st Century Cures Act, currently under discussion in the U.S. Congress (Berg, 2015d). Jessica Polka at Harvard Medical School and I previously published a call for the voice of early-career researchers (McDowell and Polka, 2015) based on aspirations of this community to have a greater voice in these debates (McDowell et al., 2014). Discouraged by the low response rate, others and we