Daniel Lemire's blog

, 4 min read

Funding science: When bureaucrats get out of control

5 thoughts on “Funding science: When bureaucrats get out of control”

  1. Djamé says:

    Hi Daniel, I fully understand. In France, we had such an overhead coming from the desiderata of the global evaluation agency (the AERES) that all departments complained, that was before the presidencial election. So the first move of the new ministry of research was to announce the dissolution of this crazy agency. But somehow those bureaucrats managed to escape and now, we will have another agency to report to (on top of the previous one). So, what does it involve for us?
    – writing a 60 pages reports (for the team), a detailed architecture of what we did and how it did fit the initial project (for each member) for :
    * the big agency (aeres)
    * the university (paris 7)
    * the research center (Inria)
    now the fun part, our team is also a lab so we had to write another report for the lab (to the same institutions) BUT this report needed to be shaped so differently we had to rewrite everything, reorganize everythin. And funny part, the publications did need to be a) counted differently b) reorganized differently. So in 2012 for the 5 permanent researchers of our lab, it involves 2 weeks of works and for the direction board, 3 more weeks. Without counting all those different financial reports they had to write.

    Worse part? this very little team is also involved in some other meta-layer of organization aiming at being the new support of research and we had to write reports for this layer too (called the Labex).

    God, just thinking about it almost brings me down to tears.

    I’m sad for all of us.
    Djamé

  2. Link to the common cv form?

  3. Yeah, I found it. Thanks. I am astonished not only by the sheer scale of the forms but also by the pickiness of them – it is *so* easy to get an error message because something wasn’t typed quite right.

  4. @Stephen Downes

    The focus on details is disturbing… Notice how the tool also prevents you from ever telling your story. It is a grandiose attempt at putting people in little boxes.