Like most of my colleagues, I not only benefit from publicly funded grants, but I also participate in the review and discussion of grant proposals.
Twice a year at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, we discuss excellent applications and try to find consensus on a score, which will eventually determine whether a grant receives funding or not. During the most recent review session, I noticed that we were discussing some applications for the fourth or fifth time, but no funding decisions had been made. Do we really have to continue like this?
All of us—reviewers, committee members, applicants—had invested enormous time to get here. Accounting for all of that time, the real cost of peer-reviewed grant selection likely runs at least 40,000 Canadian dollars per application, if not much more. With thousands of submissions at the CIHR alone, the scientific community is spending millions of dollars deciding who gets to do science, and not on doing more science. Ironically—or tragically—the system may eventually reach what is called the Szilard point, when the cost of the system exceeds its value.
We don’t have to accept this as inevitable. It is time to rethink how the funding system is organized.
Researchers are good at evaluating bottom-tier applications and exceptional proposals. But when it comes to applications that are around the midline, determining which grant to score higher than another often seems like an impossible and highly arbitrary task. To save time and resources, why not let chance decide?
The idea of a lottery-based grant review process was proposed more than a decade ago and has been adopted by grant funding initiatives in New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere. So far, these communities have welcomed the changes. Chance may also make funding fairer, the German funding program shows: The share of women among both applicants and funded researchers increased in that system after the introduction of a lottery.
Adding a lottery element to the grant review process respects everyone’s time, reduces strategic resubmission cycles and accepts that, above a quality threshold, luck has always been part of science. Before implementing these kinds of programs more broadly, however, we need to test them on a small scale and evaluate the results. That’s exactly why we’re trying it out in a small research program in Quebec.
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couple of years ago, my colleague Nadia Gosselin at the Université de Montréal and I started the Quebec Sleep Research Network, funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec ‑ Santé (the regional biomedical funding agency). Our initiative aims to strengthen the sleep research community and foster dialogue among basic researchers, clinicians, policymakers and the public. Leading such an initiative not only lets us step outside the ivory tower but also try out alternatives in how science is managed, on a small scale.One of our core missions is to distribute small-value seed grants (CA$30,000) for projects that will eventually seek larger support, especially from the CIHR. During our first grant review session in 2025, we tried something different. We asked each reviewer (three per application) to give a simple ”pass” or “fail” on a grant, based on explicit criteria. All passing grants then entered a lottery, the fate of each decided by a roll of dice (in fact, its digital equivalent).
That’s not all, though. We gave each reviewer the opportunity to flag one application as ”unmissable.” Any proposal that received two such flags went straight to the committee for direct funding, bypassing the lottery. Only one application received two unmissable flags in 2025, and it took the committee no time to agree that this application was truly exceptional. Finally, in keeping with our priority to support early-career researchers, we had an initial lottery just for them, ensuring that they received some of the grants in this review cycle. In the end, the committee met for less than an hour, and we were all satisfied with the outcome.
As I write this, we are evaluating the 2026 call. For this second competition, we sought to improve the system even further. We are automatically carrying over grants that passed in 2025 but were not selected in the lottery. And we will not carry over any older proposals, as a two-year-old proposal may have become outdated. By preventing resubmission and re-review, we save even more time for everyone.
Of course, this system is not perfect, and a lottery is not the final answer to all the problems. Two alternative approaches include baseline funding and evaluation based only on someone’s track record. Importantly, for large grants, we should not abandon discussing those proposals within study sections; a lottery system provides no feedback on how to improve an application for future competition. And a lottery alone cannot single out the most promising ideas, which is exactly why we designed our system such that exceptional proposals can skip the draw entirely.
We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community so far, and not one colleague has objected to this system. Before the next call for applications, after two evaluation cycles, we plan to survey reviewers to ask if they felt the process was fair and whether they want it to continue. Many grant reviewers say they struggle to assign a fair score. So we also plan to ask the reviewers how much time they think they saved using a binary evaluation instead and whether this approach lessened the fear that a small scoring difference might result in dire consequences for the applicant. Unfortunately, our community is too small to include a control group of grants to evaluate traditionally, and we do not have prior review sessions for comparison. Instead, we need many more experiments across countries and agencies to assess the real impact of a lottery system.
The success of lottery-based grant review will not rely on proving that the projects we fund are better—that may be impossible to show. Rather, its success will depend on developing a process that allows for good ideas to get a fair shot, in less time.
