(see original article below)

Critique of George Musser's Inaccurate Article on Grants.gov in Scientific American

Robert Beattie, University of Michigan

May, 2007

George Musser's recent article on Grants.gov in the May 1, 2007 issue of on-line SCiAM Magazine is full of inaccurate statements and thus, I think damaging to the grants community. He is himself guilty of what he accuses Grants.gov of, namely retarding progress through the use of technology but in his case, by falsely attacking that technology to prevent its use. It is one thing to be wrong but when you wrap your text in the "banner" of the country's foremost magazine on science you are dangerous. Just as the Luddites of early 19^th century England sought to bring back the bad old times by destroying new technology, George seems to suggest the old grants submission chaos was better than the nascent Grants.gov process. He is being a "Cyber Luddite."

I had a professor who once said that if you want people to believe your argument, it is best to be accurate in the presentation of your facts. It seems to me that almost every statement George makes is inaccurate. George seems to take a view of writing that if you tell a big enough distortion, people will believe it.

George first neglects to mention that Grants.gov is a developing program at the end of at least a 10 year process, supported by Congress in Public Law 106-107, by advisors to both Clinton and Bush, and by grants administrators in universities and federal agencies who participate in the 100 member Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) organization. The latter has been trying to streamline the Grants process, by which universities get funding through Peer Review to advance science and social programs. Grants.gov is also used by state and local governments, school districts, Indian tribes, and small businesses to get grant funds. All $400 billion of such funding will be applied for through this system. It is replacing the chaotic paper-based application process in which every agency had different forms and processes. Worse, they were all developing their own electronic procedures -- called by an FDP leader "rogue computer systems" because there was no commonality. Grant seekers would need to learn 26 different systems. Grants.gov gives us one form, one portal, and one system for finding and applying for grants.

I will be the first to say that Grants.gov has growing pains and I have done so at national meetings of research administrators, including at FDP, and on the Web. Yet I do not mindlessly attack the process but try to focus on specific, fixable problems that I know about from using the system and talking to others who have done so. The Grants.gov staff and some agency users such as NIH are very responsive to suggestions.

Note that the Grants.gov staff were given about a year to deliver a product that will allow all those different entities I mention above to apply for Grants from all the different Federal Agencies. In a hitherto unheard of process, members of the 26 federal grants making agencies worked together to come up with a standard form for applications -- a major breakthrough for streamlining. In order to meet the strict timeline given by the Office of Management and Budget, Grants.gov staff contracted with a small software company -- PureEdge -- to facilitate form filling.

This was not as George says,

" IBM's seminal contribution was to create the PureEdge software

package to handle the grant forms." Rather, IBM bought PureEdge a few years into the contract. Also, the misinformation continues with the statement:" If you try to run the program on a Mac under OS 10.4.9, the program pops into the dock and then disappears immediately." Yes it does, but this is well stated in the instructions. The program works only with Windows. There was a way to use Macs, developed by NIH -- Citrix -- but not the best solution. Under pressure from current Grants.gov staff, IBM's real seminal contribution, after they bought PureEdge, was to rectify this problem by providing a different program -- WorkForms -- to deal with Macs. This was crucial to us at the University of Michigan as our grants office is 100% Mac based. Since this program was released in January, 2007 we have submitted 450 applications through our Macs. We have not had one, yet alone, as George suggests, occasional crashes, so no data loss. Still, we recommend backing up files.

Next in his sarcastic way, George says, "(t)he even greater genius was to shut

down the grants.gov website for maintenance on the weekend prior

to the proposal deadline." I wonder if George thinks there is just one, as he says, "the," proposal deadline? There are actually deadlines almost every day and maintenance needs to be done sometime. When there are shutdowns, we get plenty of warning. Also, this is not a web based forms-filling system, so a user need only download the appropriate files to the desktop and then work all weekend, oblivious to any shutdown. Because it is almost always the case that a grants office will submit the applications, back to the web site, does it matter if it is not working on the weekend. The grants administrators are not either. Have I clarified another big misleading statement that is intended to make us nervous about Grants.gov? Now we see how well the system works and how well it is managed.

Further, George writes some gobblegook that I cannot understand: " One of the required forms, on which you select your field of scholarship and university affiliation, is a PDF file that requires Adobe Acrobat 8.0."

First, there are no required forms that are a PDF. Some forms need to have text files attached. Some agencies want these files to be PDF files but this varies across agencies. In all events, there is no requirement for Adobe Acrobat 8.0. I do not know what this statement is supposed to be about. Perhaps George is confused because Grants.gov is making a major improvement in the system by phasing out PureEdge/Workforms and introducing an Adobe Forms product. This works well on both Mac and non-Mac platforms and offers a number of other fixes to specific problems. This change is a cooperative effort among General Dynamics, Adobe, and Grants.gov. This will not require Adobe Acrobat 8.0 either.

Is there anything positive in George's commentary? I cannot find any truth in it. I have been using Grants.gov for 3 years and I have taught some 60 groups at Michigan on how to use it. Michigan folks have prepared, and our grants office has submitted, 800 applications during that three years. We feel Grants.gov is a useful system. It has processed some 100,000 applications in three years so they must be doing something right. The new Adobe version will fix most of the glitches. George does nothing to improve the system and much to frighten potential users. The article he quotes from the Chronicle of Higher education is a tragi-comic piece from a year and a half ago when the system had just started for NIH. It shows the problems of using a system without reading the directions nor even asking for help. Indeed, most all of the initial system problems have been fixed. I wrote a critique of it here

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~abeattie/bobsreplytoAbolish.htm

Thus, I feel that George Musser is an excellent candidate for Bob's Cyber Luddite Award. He criticizes technology he seems to know nothing about, he offers no help to improve the system, he tries to frighten users with erroneous statements. In effect he is trying bring down a new and useful way for people to deal with the federal grants mechanism, true Ludditism.

If only he had pointed out some of the Federal Agencies that are causing us real problems because they do not want to follow the new way. The Health Resources and Services Administration, for example, wants people to use Grants.gov, also send in paper copies and, moreover, connect with their own crude e-Book system. Other agencies are slow to adopt Grants.gov or they make users jump through their own "hoops." These anomaly agencies need to be given George's SA Minus Awards. I close by saying that the one time registration process for Grants.gov may be daunting for first time users with out help from a grants office but take heart, the FDP is working with Grants.gov to ease some of these constraints. So, grant seekers of the nation, unite in working with Grants.gov to produce an easy to use system for all of us.

I welcome comments, pleases send to beattie@umich.edu.

From Scientific American On-line, May 1, 2007

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=introducing_the_sa_minus_50_awards_for_t&

Introducing The SA Minus 50 Awards for the

World's Worst Technology

George Musser

Every December for the past few years, Sci Am has given out the

SA50 awards for advances in technology contributing to human

progress. But I've always felt these awards missed something very

important. They failed to recognize the technology that retards

human progress. A lot of engineers, businesspeople, and officials

work so hard creating technology to make our lives difficult, and I,

for one, think they deserve recognition.

To rectify this omission, I'll start giving out the SA Minus 50 awards.

Unlike its namesake, these awards will be given out on a rolling

basis. Deciding on winners will, of course, be an exceptionally

rigorous process.

It is my great honor to award the first SA Minus 50 award to IBM,

Adobe Systems, and the U.S. federal government for creating

grants.gov. No one would have thought that the process of applying

for scientific and scholarly grants could be made any more unwieldy

and wasteful than it already was, but these three joint winners have

managed to achieve exactly that. Well done!

IBM's seminal contribution was to create the PureEdge software

package to handle the grant forms. If you try to run the program on a

Mac under OS 10.4.9, the program pops into the dock and then

disappears immediately -- thus giving an early indication of the likely

success of your grant proposal. Getting the program to work

requires hacks that the company has thoughtfully not provided.

Users had to figure it out for themselves -- a useful test of whether

they deserve to continue doing research. IBM did, in an

uncharacteristic moment of compassion for its customers, admit that

its software is prone to "occasional crashes and subsequent loss of

any unsaved data."

To take such an unstable piece of software and base people's

livelihoods on it -- now, that is genius that only the federal

government could exhibit. The even greater genius was to shut

down the grants.gov website for maintenance on the weekend prior

to the proposal deadline.

One of the required forms, on which you select your field of

scholarship and university affiliation, is a PDF file that requires

Adobe Acrobat 8.0. Acrobat is, as every user knows, already one of

the world's most responsive and intuitive pieces of software, and we

can be grateful that Adobe has continued to improve it. The new

version crashes whenever you try to select one of the required

fields, again requiring users to jump through hoops. It gives a whole

new meaning to the term "proposal submission".

If you have any nominations for the SA Minus 50 awards, please

enter them in the comments field. I somehow doubt there will be any

shortage of possibilities.

Update (3 May 07): I've been referred to an article in the Chronicle

of Higher Education which shows that the grants.gov situation is

even worse than I depicted above:

I estimate that it took me more than 25 hours to try to

submit the grant. After 37 error messages (I have them

saved, because no one would believe me without cyber

evidence), I am still not sure the proposal was received.

I do not know whose brilliant idea Grants.gov was, but it

is clear that, as it now works, it is set up to benefit only

large universities with a "grants office." Small colleges

suffer when they attempt (or, if my experience is any

indication, when they give up attempting) to submit a

grant proposal to any federal agency.