Fig. 1.

Illustrations of existing (left) and the proposed (right) funding systems, with reviewers marked with triangles and investigators marked by squares. In most current funding models like those used by NSF and NIH, investigators write proposals in response to solicitations from funding agencies, these proposals are reviewed by small panels, and funding agencies use these reviews to help make funding decisions, providing awards to some investigators. In the proposed system, all scientists are both investigators and reviewers: every scientist receives a fixed amount of funding from the government and other scientists but is required to redistribute some fraction of it to other investigators