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The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) last week announced the 15 members of a ‘blue ribbon’ panel charged with exhaustively reviewing — and making recommendations for changing — the structure of its peer-review system.

The panel will spend the next year studying the organization of some 100 study sections and deciding whether they reflect current science or have become anachronistic. It is expected to advise on whether a broad reconfiguration of sections is needed, or whether regular monitoring is sufficient to keep the composition and subject areas of sections up to date.

Prominent members of the Panel on Scientific Boundaries for Review include Bruce Alberts, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Stuart Orkin of Harvard Medical School and David Botstein of the Stanford University School of Medicine. The chair of the panel will be appointed at its first meeting, which is unlikely to take place before April.

Alberts, who has chaired a study section, says that many of the study sections represent “ancient ways” of dividing up the field, and that some form of change is needed. He favours broader study sections that look for innovation, and would also like to see close scrutiny of ossified sections that may have become virtual entitlement programmes for their “regular clientele”, while other sections in cutting-edge areas are overwhelmed with deserving applications.

Elvera Ehrenfeld, director of NIH's Center for Scientific Review, who appointed the panel as part of a broad reassessment of NIH's peer-review system, says she is open to all ideas that aim to keep peer review abreast of science. “The process needs to be driven by science, and not the other way around,” she told the advisory panel to Harold Varmus, director of the NIH, in December.