"Regulation and oversight of research are needed to ensure accountability, transparency, and safety," said Arthur Bienenstock, chair of the NSB task force that examined the issue. "But excessive and ineffective requirements take scientists away from the bench unnecessarily and divert taxpayer dollars from research to superfluous grant administration."The rest of GEN's article can be found here and here's the original NSB report. Here's how big the problem is, as summarized by the NSB:
A 2005 Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) survey of investigators found that PIs of federally sponsored research projects spend, on average, 42 percent of their time on associated administrative tasks. Seven years later, and despite collective Federal reform efforts, a 2012 FDP survey found the average remained at 42 percent.That's right: 42%. If you're thinking of going the research route, on average, you'll spend two hours of administration to do three hours of actual research. This depends on what you actually consider 'administration' but I'd say 2 out of 5 hours is a good estimate: you might spend less if you have a small lab or are a postdoc, more if you run a big lab or have a fragmented mix of funding greasing the wheels.
Scientists reactions are mixed. On one extreme, you'll find scientists who claim that anything non-research related is a waste of their time. I don't take this position; reporting and auditing is necessary to ensure that the buyer of research is getting a good return on their research dollars. There are many questions that report docs should answer.
Some are obvious: Is the project making effective use of funding, and is time and money being spent on things that contribute to the research research goals? Are funds being spent efficiently, or can the researcher be helped to spend better?
Some are more subtle: Are the right students and postdocs being hired to do the work, and are they actually being trained to do something the funder values? Is the project fulfilling the goals set out by the sponsor, or has the scope drifted?
But regardless of the purpose, the problem with 'excessive' paperwork isn't that it's utterly pointless, it's that it detracts from the value scientists are best able to produce. Scientists, in general, want to discover things, build things, create things, and write about all that experience. But administrative tasks don't generally fall under what scientists would consider cool and if the tasks truly enter 'excessive' territory you take away the cool part of the job.
