buenos aires

Mariscotti: heading the new agency to promote peer review. Credit: KEVORK KESHISHIAN

A new science-funding agency will open in Argentina this year, multiplying by a factor of ten the money available to scientists in peer-reviewed, extramural grants.

Some see the setting up of the agency, however, as a government move to exercise more control over research, and as a threat to their independence.

The agency will aim to establish the peer-review process, according to Juan Carlos del Bello, secretary of science and technology at Argentina's education ministry. “Peer review is not widely applied in Argentina — in fact, it has not really been applied at all,” he says.

But one molecular biologist at the national council for science and technology (CONICET), which is currently the main sponsor of basic research in Argentina, argues that peer review within CONICET is already open and fair, and complains that the new agency will be government-controlled, and consequently biased towards technology.

The $35-million research grant budget of the new National Agency for the Promotion of Science and Technology is modest compared to the $900 million that the Argentine government will spend on research and development this year. But both the government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which provided loans to the agency, expect its influence greatly to exceed its raw spending power.

The agency's director is Mario Mariscotti, a respected physicist who is also president of the Argentine National Academy of Sciences. Applications for the agency's first round of grants were invited last August and are now under review. The applications received for the grants — each worth about $25,000 a year for three years — numbered 2,400, and 700 awards will be made.

The grants are expected to support teams of three people; they exclude salaries, which will normally be paid by the university or institute where the researcher works. The Argentinian government is negotiating with the IDB to increase the value of each grant to an annual $50,000 next time round.

Fourteen active scientists from different disciplines have been appointed to vet the applications and send them for review by qualified peers inside and outside Argentina. After the best applications are identified, committees of scientists from each of the 14 disciplines will select recipients on the basis of their ‘relevance’ to national goals as spelt out in the new National Plan for Science and Technology for 1998-2000.

Del Bello, an economist who was responsible for Argentinian universities before taking up his current post in 1996, has harsh words for CONICET. CONICET runs 150 institutes and employs 3,000 staff scientists — leaving only $4 million of its $200 million budget for external grants. Although the CONICET institutes are often physically attached to universities, del Bello says the bedfellows have commonly been “in conflict” with each other. The CONICET institutes “are independent entities, isolated and sometimes privileged”, he says, and their staff “refuse to teach”.

Given such government sentiments about an organization that employs most of the country's leading scientists, it is unsurprising that the new agency has attracted considerable criticism. It is seen by some scientists as an attempt by the government to direct research more forcibly and as a threat to their traditional independence.

The molecular biologist from CONICET says that del Bello wanted to dismantle CONICET when he took office, but was dissuaded from doing so “by scientists' demonstrations”. Del Bello denies that he had any such intention — although he points out that the World Bank suggested privatizing the CONICET institutes.