Daydreaming of a "cut the BS paperwork" campaign in academia. I think I could easily spend 10-20% more time on actual science if we could get rid of or streamline useless blurbs, reports, letters...for example:
Fluffy letters of support. Can we stop pretending that these expressions of enthusiasm and support are actually written by the signees? It's meaningless. Let's enforce a template that cuts the crap and only allows max 100 words of factual content.
Abstracts for invited seminars. These are so generic that they're useless for everyone involved. Title of the talk, name of the speaker, and maybe bio or google should be enough for people to decide if they want to attend the talk.
Interim progress reports for grants. Are these REALLY needed every year? If in practice the funding will continue anyway, don't ask for a report. Or ask for only the very specific information needed for the funding decision.
Data access or ancillary study progress reports and yearly renewals. This should be a single "We're (not) working on this" click if even that. dbGap asking for a yearly list of presentations based on each data set is INSANE.
So many things in grant applications. Couldn't we combine Statement of Work into Budget Justification? Can't we have a single biosketch where modifications for each grant are not expected?
It's a death by a thousand cuts. Especially for us in this uncanny valley of many projects and grants but not quite big enough an operation to have a scientific project manager in the lab.
CC @NIHFunding
