washington

A plan by the US space agency NASA to hire a single contractor to manage the peer review of all its research grant proposals has made some scientists worried that the quality of review will suffer during the transition period.

The agency hopes to invite small, minority-owned businesses this summer to bid for a ‘consolidated peer review’ contract to administer the outside evaluation of grant proposals in space science, Earth science, life and microgravity science, equal opportunity programmes, and education. Currently each office handles its own peer-review logistics, with about 5,000 proposals considered across the agency each year.

NASA intends to award a five-year contract worth more than $50 million by next February. The agency's move to consolidate peer review follows a recent push to streamline its headquarters management and speed up the processing of grants (see Nature 393, 403; 1998).

But several scientists voiced their concern about the plan during last week's meeting of NASA's external advisory group for life and microgravity sciences. They worry that hard-won improvements to the existing peer-review system, which have raised the reputation of NASA experiments and brought them more in line with research conducted by the National Institutes of Health, will be jeopardized if the new contractor lacks experience.

“If we start going backward, what credibility has been built up may be lost,” said Kenneth Baldwin of the University of California at Irvine, the chairman of NASA's life sciences advisory subcommittee. Gerard Faeth of the University of Michigan, who chairs the subcommittee for microgravity science, called the consolidation “probably the most critical issue for my constituency”.

Those two disciplines have much at stake, as the office for life and microgravity sciences now gives responsibility for peer review — including selecting and presiding over review panels — to its contractor, Information Dynamics, Inc. of Virginia.

In contrast, NASA's space science office handles some of its peer-review duties in-house. Science research programme director Guenter Riegler says that consolidation could benefit his office by providing more contractor help to a small group of NASA civil servants. But managing the transition will be the difficult part, says David Bohlin, who runs the peer-review process for space science. “We have to keep the system operating while we [shift to a single contractor],” he says.