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Thinking about my thread this morning on why independent research is hard, and what it would take to make it possible, and whether it’s within the reach of private investors who ALL complain endlessly about how they have far too much capital and don’t know where to put it.
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I was briefly calling myself an independent researcher: somebody who self-funds spec R&D on their own ideas. In theory it’s something like indie-research : academic research :: blogging/self-publishing : traditional publishing. But the idea doesn’t really work.
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On one extreme you can think UBI, which is roughly ~ early grad student level $. On the other extreme, you could think of early career faculty grants. An NSF CAREER grant is 100k/year for 5 yrs, and in 2018, about 150 million was disbursed or about 300.
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A subset of ~20 get PECASE awards which push up the 100k to 500k/yr, sp that’s another 40 million. This 190 million basically supports 300 new faculty every year which I think is approximately ALL new faculty in say the top 25-30 universities.
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At grad student stipend level, you’re talking about a quarter that. 25k/year. So you could support about 1200 grad student level researchers for the same amount. So $19- million gets you somewhere between 300 to 1200 bets on independent researchers. Now who can afford that?
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Nearly all universities have about 50% overhead or more on grant money, so half that # is more accurate. But for independent funders they could specify no overhead
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I address that separately elsewhere in the thread. Indirect cost support is added on top, not taken off the base grant iirc. So for a 100k fed grant, researcher gets 100k and univ another 50k on top I believe. It’s been a while but that was how the books used to be done iirc.