Executive Summary
This paper addresses the hardest practical problem the field faces: how a discipline whose central business is to study what institutional science neglects can secure funding from the same institutions whose attention patterns it exists to examine. The problem is not merely awkward. It is structural, and the field’s long-term viability depends on solving it in ways that neither compromise the field’s analytical independence nor leave it perpetually marginal.
The paper develops six arguments. The first is that conventional grant mechanisms tend to reproduce existing research priorities through well-understood reviewer-selection and track-record effects, which means that the standard funding pathway is poorly suited to a field whose work routinely challenges existing priorities. The second is that several alternative funding instruments — lottery allocation, golden-ticket schemes, prize-based funding, retrospective grants, and high-risk programs — have been developed in adjacent contexts and offer partial precedents for what the field needs. The third is that private philanthropy is the most likely first mover for the field, but that exclusive reliance on philanthropic funding creates vulnerabilities that the field’s founding planners should anticipate. The fourth is that public-sector funding can be secured through specific argumentative strategies that have worked for adjacent fields and that draw on the field’s potential contribution to research-policy decisions. The fifth is that institutional endowments — chairs, named centers, and dedicated fellowship programs — provide stability that no other funding source can match and should be priorities for the field’s longer-term consolidation. The sixth is that the field needs its own funded research agenda on the funding system itself, both because the topic is intellectually appropriate to the field and because the findings would inform the field’s own funding strategy.
The paper concludes with a discussion of sequencing and a frank treatment of the failure modes that the field’s funding strategy must anticipate.
1. Introduction
The preceding papers have addressed what neglect studies would study (Paper 1), how it would study it (Paper 2), and the academic infrastructure within which the work would be conducted (Paper 3). All three presupposed that the field would have resources. This paper takes up the question those presuppositions defer.
The funding problem for neglect studies has a structural feature that distinguishes it from the funding problems of most emerging fields. Most new fields can argue that they address questions the existing research system has not yet recognized as important, and the argument is usually made to funders whose own portfolios are not implicated in the critique. A new field of cellular biology in the 1950s could plausibly argue that the existing biological sciences had not yet appreciated the importance of cellular mechanisms, and the argument could be made to funders whose investments in organismal biology were not threatened by the new field’s growth. The new field added to the research system without subtracting from it.
Neglect studies is differently situated. Its central business is the systematic identification of cases in which the existing research system has misallocated attention, and the existing research system is the same system that the field must approach for funding. The asymmetry is not absolute — funders have genuine interests in improving their own decision-making, and the field’s outputs are useful to them on those grounds — but the asymmetry is real, and the field’s funding strategy must take it seriously.
The argument of this paper is not that the funding problem is unsolvable. Comparable problems have been solved for adjacent fields, and the solutions, where examined carefully, suggest pathways that neglect studies can adapt. The argument is rather that the funding problem requires deliberate strategic thinking from the outset, that the strategy must include multiple revenue streams whose vulnerabilities do not correlate, and that the strategy must preserve the analytical independence on which the field’s value to its funders depends.
2. Why Conventional Grant Mechanisms Are Poorly Suited
The mechanisms by which conventional grant programs allocate funding have been studied extensively, and the findings are consistent across multiple fields and funding agencies.[^1] Three features of standard peer-reviewed grant programs are particularly relevant to the prospects for neglect-studies funding.
The first is reviewer selection. Grant reviewers are drawn from the established researchers in a field, which means that the questions reviewers find compelling are the questions the field is already pursuing. Proposals that depart from established questions face a structural disadvantage: reviewers must understand the proposal’s framing well enough to evaluate it, and proposals framed around questions the reviewers do not recognize as important are systematically rated lower than proposals framed around established questions. The effect is well documented in studies of grant review across multiple agencies, and it operates without any individual reviewer behaving in bad faith.
The second is track record. Grant applications are evaluated in part on the applicant’s record of previous work, and the standard measures of that record — prior publications in major outlets, prior grant funding, citation counts — are themselves shaped by the same attention patterns the field is trying to study. A scholar who has built a career working on a neglected question will have a record that looks weaker by standard measures than a scholar working on an established question, even when the substantive quality of the work is comparable. The applicant’s record problem compounds the reviewer problem, with the result that scholars working on neglected questions face two reinforcing structural disadvantages in the standard grant system.
The third is project specificity. Conventional grants require applicants to specify what they will do, what they expect to find, and what methods they will use, in sufficient detail for reviewers to assess feasibility. The specifications work well for projects that build on established methods and address established questions, but they work poorly for projects that propose to develop new methods, to identify what is not yet recognized, or to recover lines of inquiry whose specifics cannot be fully specified before the recovery work has been done. Several of the methodological approaches outlined in Paper 2 — historical recovery, exploratory bibliometric mapping, expert elicitation in areas without established expert communities — fit poorly into the conventional grant template.
The implication is not that conventional grants are useless to the field. Established scholars working on substantiated cases of neglect, using mature methods, can compete for conventional funding successfully, and the field should pursue such funding actively. The implication is rather that conventional grants alone are insufficient, particularly for the field’s exploratory and methodologically innovative work, and that the funding strategy must include mechanisms designed for the kinds of projects that the conventional system is structurally poor at supporting.
3. Alternative Funding Instruments
Several alternative funding instruments have been developed in adjacent contexts and offer partial precedents for what neglect studies needs. Each is reviewed below with its strengths, limitations, and applicability to the field.
3.1 Lottery Allocation
Lottery allocation, in which grants are awarded by random selection from a pool of proposals that meet a threshold quality standard, has been piloted in several settings, including the Health Research Council of New Zealand’s explorer grants and several European national funding agencies’ experimental programs.[^2] The argument for lottery allocation is that the precision of conventional peer review is lower than its formal status suggests, that the costs of preparing applications and conducting reviews are substantial, and that random selection from a quality-screened pool produces outcomes nearly as good as conventional peer review at much lower administrative cost.
For neglect studies, lottery allocation has a specific additional appeal. The reviewer-selection and track-record effects that disadvantage proposals on neglected questions in conventional peer review are removed once a proposal has cleared the quality threshold, because the final selection among qualifying proposals is random rather than based on reviewer preferences. The field would benefit if lottery mechanisms became more widespread in research funding, and the field’s scholars should both contribute to the methodological evaluation of lottery programs and advocate for their expansion where evidence supports it.
The limitations are that lottery allocation depends on a quality-screening step whose criteria are themselves vulnerable to the same biases as conventional peer review, that the lottery component is politically controversial and slow to gain institutional acceptance, and that the field cannot rely on lottery mechanisms in the short term because the existing programs are small and the expansion of the model is uncertain.
3.2 Golden-Ticket Schemes
A golden-ticket scheme allows a small number of senior researchers — typically program officers, distinguished scientists, or members of a standing advisory committee — to fund a small number of projects per year without going through the standard review process. The Volkswagen Foundation’s experimental program along these lines has been documented, and similar mechanisms exist in several national agencies.[^3] The mechanism allows projects that conventional review would reject to receive funding when a credible senior figure judges them worth supporting.
For neglect studies, the golden-ticket mechanism is particularly well-suited to the field’s exploratory and high-risk work. A program officer who understands the field can use a golden-ticket allocation to fund a historical recovery project that conventional review would find insufficiently specified, or a methodological development project whose returns are uncertain. The mechanism trades some accountability for some flexibility, and the trade is worth making for a fraction of the funding portfolio.
The limitations are that golden-ticket schemes depend on the program officer’s judgment being good, that they create accountability concerns when projects fail, and that they are politically vulnerable to criticism as patronage. The field should advocate for golden-ticket mechanisms in research funding generally, and should encourage funders that adopt them to allocate some of the tickets to neglect-studies projects, but should not depend on the mechanism as a primary funding source.
3.3 Prize-Based Funding
Prize-based funding allocates resources retrospectively, by rewarding work that has been completed and judged successful, rather than prospectively, by funding work that has been proposed. The mechanism has been developed extensively in technology development — the X Prize family is the most visible example — and more recently in basic research through programs like the Breakthrough Prizes.[^4] Prize-based funding has the advantage of selecting on demonstrated quality rather than on the persuasiveness of an application, and the disadvantage of requiring researchers to fund the underlying work before the prize is available.
For neglect studies, prize-based funding can serve as a complement to other mechanisms rather than as a primary source. A prize for the best historical recovery of an abandoned research program, or for the best methodological contribution to bibliometric mapping of neglected areas, would incentivize work in the field’s priority areas without requiring the prize-awarding body to evaluate proposals. Prize programs are relatively straightforward to administer and can be funded by individual donors who want to support the field but who are not positioned to fund larger programs.
The limitations are familiar: prizes work best when the criteria for excellence are clear and when the prize amount is large enough to motivate substantial work. The field’s prize programs should be designed with both criteria in mind and should be understood as supplements to rather than substitutes for the main funding pathways.
3.4 Retrospective Funding for Previously Unfunded Work
A specific variant of prize-based funding deserves separate treatment. Retrospective funding programs reimburse researchers for work they have completed without prior funding, either through full grants or through smaller supplementary awards. The mechanism addresses a problem specific to scholars who have worked on neglected questions: the work has often been done on personal time, in unfunded projects, or as a side effort within larger funded programs whose primary purpose was something else.
For neglect studies, retrospective funding has two attractions. It rewards scholars who have already invested in neglected work without the institutional support that the field aims to build, which is a way of honoring the field’s intellectual debt to its precursors. And it identifies the scholars whose careers and recent work make them natural participants in the field’s consolidation, which serves the field’s community-building goals. A modest retrospective-funding program, administered by one of the field’s founding centers, would be a useful element of the funding mix.
3.5 High-Risk Programs
Several major funders have established programs specifically for high-risk research that conventional review would reject. The U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Director’s Pioneer Award, the National Science Foundation’s EAGER mechanism, the European Research Council’s various advanced grant programs, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s program structure all represent different attempts to address the problem that conventional review is conservative.[^5] The programs vary in size, in the breadth of fields they support, and in the criteria they use to identify high-risk work.
For neglect studies, the high-risk programs are partially relevant. The field’s work is not high-risk in the same sense that a moonshot biological experiment is — most neglect-studies projects have modest budgets and predictable methods — but the field’s exploratory work shares with high-risk research the feature that its specific outputs cannot be predicted in advance. The argument for funding the field through high-risk programs has been made successfully in several adjacent metascience contexts, and the same argument should be applicable for neglect studies.
The limitations are that high-risk programs are competitive, that they have their own selection biases (often favoring established researchers whose track records make the risk seem worth taking), and that the funding amounts are typically larger than neglect-studies projects require. The mechanism is useful for the field’s larger and more ambitious projects but is not the natural home for the field’s bread-and-butter work.
4. Private Philanthropy as the Likely First Mover
The case for private philanthropy as the field’s most important early funding source rests on three considerations. The first is that foundations are structurally less constrained than public funders to align their portfolios with established research priorities. A foundation whose mission includes epistemic diversity, open science, or research reform can fund neglect studies without justifying the funding against the priorities of an established field, in a way that public funders typically cannot. The second is that foundations have shorter decision cycles than public funders, which allows them to respond to emerging fields more quickly. The third is that several foundations have already demonstrated interest in adjacent areas — metascience, open science, research reform, the philosophy of science — that make them natural candidates for engagement with the proposed field.
The foundations most plausibly aligned with the field’s mission include those that have funded the broader metascience and open-science enterprise, those whose missions emphasize the structure of scholarly inquiry, those whose missions emphasize particular substantively neglected areas (women’s health, rare diseases, environmental justice), and the family foundations of donors whose personal histories include direct encounters with neglected questions. The field’s founding strategy should include systematic engagement with foundations in each of these categories, with proposals tailored to the foundation’s particular mission.
The advantages of philanthropic funding come with corresponding vulnerabilities. Foundations are not permanent institutions; their priorities shift with changes in leadership, with the death of founding donors, and with shifts in the broader philanthropic climate. A field that depends on any single foundation’s support is vulnerable to that foundation’s reorientation, and the vulnerability is not theoretical. Several emerging fields in recent decades have been substantially damaged by the loss of foundation support that had been their primary funding base.
The implications for the field’s strategy are several. The field should pursue multiple foundation funders rather than concentrating on any one, even if one foundation is willing to be a primary partner. The field should use philanthropic funding to build infrastructure that can survive the loss of any individual funder — endowments, institutional commitments, training pipelines — rather than to support ongoing operations that would collapse without continued philanthropic support. And the field should be transparent with its philanthropic funders about its long-term ambitions for funding diversification, both because honesty is intrinsically appropriate and because foundations that understand the field’s strategy are more likely to support the diversification effort than foundations that have not been told about it.
5. Public-Sector Funding
The argument for pursuing public-sector funding alongside philanthropic funding is partly about diversification and partly about the specific advantages of public funding. Public funders provide larger and more sustained support than most foundations, they often have longer time horizons, and their funding decisions are more visible, which means that public funding for the field would signal that the field has achieved a level of recognition that purely philanthropic funding does not.
The challenge is that public funders are more constrained than private ones to align their portfolios with established research priorities, and the field’s mission is precisely to question those priorities. The strategy for securing public funding must therefore include arguments that present the field’s work in terms that public funders can accept without committing themselves to positions their political environments would find difficult.
Three argumentative strategies have worked for adjacent fields and should be deployed for neglect studies.
The first is the quality-improvement argument. Public funders have an institutional interest in improving the quality of their own decision-making, and the field’s outputs are directly relevant to that interest. A funding agency that supports research on how its own grant decisions could be improved is not endorsing any particular critique of its existing portfolio; it is investing in its own institutional learning. The argument has worked for the broader metascience enterprise, with substantial public funding flowing to research on peer review, reproducibility, and research evaluation, and the same argument should work for the parts of neglect studies that bear directly on funding-agency decision-making.
The second is the return-on-investment argument. The counterfactual reasoning proposed in Paper 2 produces estimates of the expected returns to research investment, and those estimates can be used to argue that better identification of high-value neglected areas would improve the returns to public research investment overall. The argument is partial — the estimates are uncertain, and public funders are constrained by political and institutional considerations beyond expected value — but it provides a framing in which the field’s work serves rather than challenges the funder’s mission.
The third is the equity argument. Several aspects of neglect studies, particularly the peripheral-inquiries and constituency-less-questions categories of Paper 1, bear directly on questions of equity in research portfolios. Public funders in many jurisdictions have explicit commitments to equity in research, and the field’s outputs are directly relevant to those commitments. The argument has worked for research on health disparities, for the inclusion of underrepresented populations in clinical trials, and for the support of research from underrepresented regions, and the same logic should apply to the field’s work on the structural mechanisms that produce neglect in these areas.
A practical consideration: public funding for the field is more likely to come through programs not specifically designated for it than through dedicated programs. A scholar working on neglect studies methodology may be funded through a metascience program, a program on research policy, a program on a particular substantive area in which neglect studies tools are being applied, or a general program for which the project happens to be competitive. The field’s strategy should accordingly include cultivating program officers across multiple funding lines, building the relationships and the documented track record that allow scholars to apply through whichever programs fit best, rather than waiting for dedicated neglect-studies funding to materialize.
The longer-term goal of dedicated public funding for the field should be pursued but should be understood as a destination rather than a near-term objective. The case for dedicated funding will become more compelling as the field accumulates a track record of useful outputs, and the case should be made through the channels that have worked for adjacent fields — formal reports to advisory bodies, engagement with congressional and parliamentary committees, white papers commissioned by interested agencies, and the gradual accumulation of program officers who understand the field’s work and can advocate internally for dedicated support.
6. Institutional Endowments
The most stable funding source for an academic field is an endowment whose returns support ongoing activity in perpetuity. Endowments take longer to build than other funding mechanisms, and they require donor relationships that are different in character from the foundation relationships discussed above, but they provide a foundation for the field that no other funding source can match.
The forms of endowment most relevant to the field are three.
The first is endowed chairs in neglect studies at the founding centers. An endowed chair provides a permanent faculty position in the field at a major research university, which both supports the individual scholar who holds the chair and signals institutional commitment to the field that other faculty appointments do not match. Endowed chairs typically require donor commitments in the range of two to five million dollars in current U.S. terms, and the relationship-building required to secure such commitments is substantial. The relevant donor population includes individuals whose personal histories include encounters with neglected questions, philanthropists with broader interests in the structure of scholarly inquiry, and the donor advisory committees of foundations whose missions align with the field.
The second is named research centers. A named center, supported by an endowment that funds its operating budget, provides the institutional stability that distinguishes a permanent institution from a project-funded one. Named centers in adjacent fields have typically required donor commitments in the range of ten to twenty-five million dollars, with the variation depending on the center’s size and the cost structure of the host institution. The donor population is similar to that for endowed chairs but is smaller, since fewer donors are positioned to make commitments at the scale required.
The third is dedicated fellowship programs. A named fellowship program supports residential or virtual fellowships for scholars working in the field, and a well-endowed fellowship program can support a steady stream of senior scholars whose participation builds the field’s community even when their primary affiliations are elsewhere. Fellowship endowments are smaller than chair or center endowments — typically one to three million dollars per fellowship line — and can be built incrementally as donor relationships develop.
The field’s endowment strategy should be pursued in parallel with its other funding work, on the assumption that endowment-scale donor relationships take five to ten years to develop and that early founding investments in the relationships will produce returns only in the second decade of the field’s existence. The institutional advancement offices of the founding centers should be informed about the field’s endowment ambitions from the outset, and the centers’ directors should be expected to invest substantial time in the donor cultivation that endowment building requires.
7. A Research Agenda on the Funding System Itself
The field has an additional reason to attend to funding questions beyond the practical one. The funding system is itself one of the most important mechanisms by which scholarly attention is allocated, and the systematic study of how funding decisions shape research portfolios is a core topic for the field. The relevant questions include how grant-review processes produce conservatism, how funding-agency priority-setting interacts with the priorities of the scholars who serve on review panels, how the geographic and institutional distribution of grants affects subsequent attention to questions, and how the time horizons of funding programs affect the kinds of work that can be pursued.
A research agenda on the funding system is intellectually appropriate to the field, and the findings would inform the field’s own funding strategy in ways that purely strategic thinking cannot. The agenda should be pursued through partnerships with funding agencies that are willing to make their decision-making accessible to study, through bibliometric and archival work on the historical record of funding decisions, and through comparative studies of funding systems in different national contexts. The James Lind Alliance and the broader patient-and-public-involvement literature provide precedents for this kind of work in the specific context of health research funding,[^6] and the broader metascience literature has begun to develop parallel work for other funding contexts.
A specific recommendation is that one of the founding centers should host a research program on funding systems as a core part of its work, both because the program would contribute to the field’s substantive agenda and because the program’s findings would be directly useful for the field’s own strategy. The program should produce both peer-reviewed scholarship and practical outputs directed at funders — reports, briefings, advisory engagements — that translate the scholarship into terms funders can use.
8. Sequencing and Failure Modes
The funding strategy outlined above involves many parallel activities, and the question of sequencing matters less than the question of how the activities are coordinated. The proposal is that all the funding streams discussed in this paper should be pursued from the field’s earliest years, with the recognition that different streams will produce results on different time horizons and that the field’s resource base will shift in composition over time.
In the first three to five years, the field’s funding will likely come primarily from philanthropy, with smaller contributions from conventional grants secured by individual scholars working through established disciplinary channels. The founding centers will need to demonstrate productivity during this period, both because the productivity is the foundation for everything else and because the philanthropic funders will be evaluating their investment in the field as the early period progresses.
In years five to ten, the funding mix should diversify to include substantial public funding, secured through the strategies outlined above, and the beginnings of endowment funding from donor relationships that the founding centers have been cultivating. The journal, conference, and registry should be self-sustaining by this point, on funding models established at their launch.
In years ten to twenty, the field’s funding should rest on a diversified base in which no single source provides more than perhaps thirty percent of total funding, in which endowment income provides a stable foundation that protects against short-term shocks, and in which the funding mix includes substantial contributions from sources that did not exist or did not support the field in its founding years.
The failure modes that the strategy must anticipate are several. The first is the loss of an early major philanthropic supporter before alternative funding has been secured, which would force the field into rapid contraction at a stage when contraction is most damaging. The corrective is diversification from the outset, even when diversification involves accepting smaller commitments from multiple funders rather than larger commitments from one. The second is the capture of the field by a funder whose priorities the field must accommodate in ways that compromise its analytical independence. The corrective is institutional: the founding centers’ governance must include explicit protections for editorial and research independence, and the field’s scholars must be willing to refuse funding whose conditions would compromise the field’s value. The third is the persistent marginality of the field, in which it secures enough funding to survive but not enough to consolidate, leaving its scholars in precarious positions and its institutional infrastructure underdeveloped. The corrective is patience combined with strategic discipline: the field must be willing to develop slowly rather than to compromise the methodological and institutional standards on which its long-term value depends.
The deepest failure mode is one that the field shares with several adjacent enterprises in the broader landscape of research-reform work. A field whose mission is to examine the institutions that fund it can find that its mission has been domesticated, that its outputs have been incorporated into the funders’ standard practice in ways that drain the work of its critical edge, and that the field has become a service provider to the funders rather than an independent voice. The risk is real, and the field’s institutional design should include explicit safeguards against it. The safeguards are partly procedural — independent editorial governance, diversified funding, professional standards that reward uncomfortable findings — and partly cultural, in the sense that the field’s professional community must maintain a culture in which the conscience of the field is more important than its access to resources. The cultural maintenance is the harder of the two and the more important.
9. Conclusion
This paper has argued that the funding problem for neglect studies is hard but not unsolvable, that the solution requires a diversified strategy that does not depend on any single source, and that the strategy must include both pragmatic engagement with existing funding mechanisms and the longer-term work of building dedicated funding sources that the field controls. The paper has identified philanthropic foundations as the likely first movers, public funders as essential second-stage partners, endowments as the foundation for long-term stability, and a research agenda on funding systems as both intellectually appropriate to the field and strategically valuable for it.
The funding problem cannot be solved by argument alone. It requires the patient relationship-building, the production of credible outputs, the demonstration of useful contributions, and the political and institutional work that emerging fields have always required. The argument of this series is that the work is worth doing, that the obstacles are surmountable, and that the field’s eventual contributions to the scholarly enterprise and to public policy will justify the founding investment many times over. Whether the argument is correct depends on what the founding scholars and their funders actually do over the next decade.
Paper 5 takes up the data infrastructure that the field’s research will require.
Notes
[^1]: The literature on grant peer review and its biases is reviewed in Lee, Sugimoto, Zhang, and Cronin (2013) and in subsequent work. The specific findings on conservatism in grant review are developed in Boudreau, Guinan, Lakhani, and Riedl (2016) and in Nicholson and Ioannidis (2012).
[^2]: The Health Research Council of New Zealand’s explorer grants program and subsequent lottery-based programs are documented in Liu et al. (2020). The broader argument for lottery allocation is developed in Fang and Casadevall (2016) and in Avin (2019).
[^3]: The Volkswagen Foundation’s experimentation with alternative funding models, including elements of golden-ticket allocation, is documented in the foundation’s own program reports. The broader literature on alternatives to conventional peer review in funding includes Roumbanis (2019) on lottery and golden-ticket mechanisms.
[^4]: The literature on prize-based funding is partly scholarly and partly practical; Stine (2009) provides a Congressional Research Service overview of the U.S. government’s use of prizes, and Williams (2012) addresses the comparative advantages of prizes versus grants for research support.
[^5]: The U.S. NIH Director’s Pioneer Award has been evaluated in Azoulay, Graff Zivin, and Manso (2011) and in subsequent analyses. The broader literature on high-risk funding mechanisms is reviewed in Heinze (2008).
[^6]: The James Lind Alliance methodology and its application to research-funding priorities are documented in Cowan and Oliver (2021) and in Crowe, Fenton, Hall, Cowan, and Chalmers (2015). The broader literature on patient and public involvement in research funding is reviewed in Manafò, Petermann, Vandall-Walker, and Mason-Lai (2018).
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