As associate professor and first - author Johan Bollen writes in an e-mail to Science Careers, they wanted their new system to «enable scientists to set their own priorities,
fund scientists... not projects, avoid proposal writing and reviewing, avoid administrative burdens, encourage all scientists to participate collectively in the definition of scientific priorities, encourage innovation,
reward scientists that make significant contributions to data, software, methods, and systems, avoid
funding death spirals (no
funding -
> no research -
> no
funding) but still
reward high levels of productivity, create the proper incentives for scholarly communication (publishing to communicate, not to improve bibliometrics), enable
funding of daring and risky research, and so on.»