Musings of a post-stimulus mind...

The current global economic downturn affects us all in many different ways. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 includes support designed to stimulate the economy of medical research for Fiscal Years (FYs) 2009 and 2010, in part through funds directed to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) for this purpose. One sweeping, general-purpose, investigator-initiated funding opportunity was undertaken recently using a new grant mechanism and process, entitled “Recovery Act Limited Competition: NIH Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research (RC1)”. Constrained in scope to specific ‘Challenge Topics’, identified by the various NIH Institutes and Centers, this program can be considered the front-line of attack on the psychological doldrums that had begun to infect the research community in light of the recent economic downturn (as well as other, hopefully temporary, drains on the US tax dollar) that has resulted in dramatic reductions in availability of research support. It can certainly be said that this program has ‘stimulated’ a lot of talk, thought, and brainstorming for new and exciting ideas in order to compete for this funding. The actual economic stimulation of the RC1 program, however, cannot be expected to be substantial, as the math clearly shows: there are ~200 awards expected to be made, out of approximately 1,000 ‘Challenge Topic’ areas, from an anticipated pool of multiple thousands of applicants. Depending upon the actual number of applications received (now estimated at over 15,000), one can rest assured that this will be a much harder grant to get than the typical ‘regular’ research grant, even in this economic climate. So, yes, $200M will flow into the research economy, but at what cost in the redirection of the intellectual focus of the community over the past months? But alas, leaving the mathematical improbabilities aside like a seasoned lottery ticket purchaser, my ‘see a grant opportunity—write a grant’ mentality drew me into the fray of frenzied and frenetic fundraising festivities. In the aftermath of this process, I find myself left with only a few spare nonrefractory neurons in order to piece together an insightful set of editorial comments for this issue. So I leave you, dear reader, with a few random musings that only loosely fit together. Data sharing, in practice and policy, is a common topic in the pages of this journal (Eckersley et al. 2003; Gardner et al. 2003; Kennedy 2003, 2004, 2006; Liu and Ascoli 2007; Van Horn and Ishai 2007; Teeters et al. 2008; Van Horn and Ball 2008). The good news, in the field of neuroimaging, is that more and more data is becoming available (see Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) (Mueller et al. 2005), Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) (Marcus et al. 2007), and the NIH Study of Normal Brain Development (Evans 2006), for example). The bad news, for anyone who has actually tried to avail themselves of this wealth of information, is that the consumer of this data is faced with a dramatic variability in the types of ‘data sharing’ and ‘data use’ policies that they encounter. These policies range from, and I paraphrase a bit, “Here, take it” to “You can only have it if [insert your divine being here] approves, and signs in triplicate, and even then we might not let you have it...”. Is it unreasonable to expect a more uniform, and less Neuroinform (2009) 7:85–87 DOI 10.1007/s12021-009-9050-5