Peer review, as conducted by the National Institutes of Health, is not great at determining relative merit among the top 20 to 30 percent of grants. A new paper by Ferric Fang and Arturo Cassadevall expands on their previous proposal to fund meritorious grants by a lottery system rather than continuing to use the rankings determined by peer review. This system would depend on peer review to sort grants into meritorious and non-meritorious bins, but then rely on a lottery to determine which meritorious grants receive funding.
Others have voiced concerns about this approach and raised important questions. What do you think?