"A concept known as the Szilard point helps to contextualize the issues arising from excessive competition for grants. Named after the Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard, who wrote a short story [1] satirizing the bureaucratic nature of scientific funding, this metric describes the threshold at which the total cost of competing for a grant equals (or surpasses) the value of the available funding. These costs are incurred by scientists in writing proposals, by their peers in reviewing them and by the administrative systems that run the process. The question is, which costs more: the research being funded, or the application process itself?"
https://web.archive.org/web/20260115084352/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04060-x
[1] https://www.gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr/~pierre.comon/FichiersPdf/theMarkGableFoundation.pdf
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