ACADEMIA Letters Redirect Indirects: A Phased Approach to Decentralized Research Funding Nathan Schilaty, University of South Florida David Hedges, Billings Clinic Funding is critical to all biomedical research; it allows a researcher to support research mentees (graduate students and postdocs), employ research staf (technicians, research coordinators, staf scientists, etc.), purchase lab and research supplies/equipment, and cover the costs of pub- lication. Being able to pursue innovative ideas is predicated on these building blocks. Without funding, innovative research pursuit simply cannot proceed. Consequently, researchers can easily become obsessed with securement of grant funds – their careers literally hang in the balance. However, funding rates are in a dramatic decline.2–4 With an ofcial funding rate of approximately 20%, due to resubmission procedures, actual funding rates are less than 10% per grant and funding is biased towards ‘established’ researchers. Furthermore, these low rates “impose a substantial opportunity cost on researchers by wasting a large fraction of the available research time for at least half of our scientists, reducing national scientifc output, and driving many capable scientists away from productive and potentially valuable lines of research.”4 The time costs are enormous: Hippel & Hippel estimate that a principal investigator must spend approximately 116 hours per large research grant. With 3 submission deadlines a year, 3 proposals a year for a young researcher desperate for funding could eas- ily expend over 2 months of cumulative efort with little hope for success. This ‘lost efort’ does not allow for creative solutions or actual research results.4 Additionally, while federal funding rightly supports national needs and federal initiatives, these national priorities can easily overlook local biomedical or technological needs as the federal priorities may not align with local gaps in medical care. In the current funding environment, federal funding is the dominant supporter of academic research, meaning that researchers are unlikely to be solving local problems or needs. To secure funding, researchers must pander to national program an- Academia Letters, February 2022 Corresponding Author: Nathan Schilaty, nschilaty@usf.edu Citation: Schilaty, N., Hedges, D. (2022). Redirect Indirects: A Phased Approach to Decentralized Research Funding. Academia Letters, Article 4881. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4881. 1 ©2022 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0