There has been a recent increase in attention toward the proper targets of evaluation in science funding policy. Specifically, some claim that we should 'fund people, not projects' to allow for increased autonomy for researchers. Critics argue that this movement unduly opens room for biases against several marginalized groups of scientists. In…

Despite the surging interest in introducing lottery mechanisms into decision-making procedures for science funding bodies, the discourse on funding-by-lottery remains underdeveloped and, at times, misleading. Funding-by-lottery is sometimes presented as if it were a single mechanism when, in reality, there are many funding-by-lottery mechanisms…

The way research is, and should be, funded by the public sphere is the subject of renewed interest for sociology, economics, management sciences, and more recently, for the philosophy of science. In this contribution, I propose a qualitative, epistemological criticism of the funding by lottery model, which is advocated by a growing number of…

Science and Technology (S&T) indicators are contingent knowledge demanding critique and contextualization for validity: they are value-laden devices. Hence their potential for generating biased knowledge, exhibiting the attributes of devices enabling the social construction of bias and ignorance. But indicators are also prone to criticism and…

The use of indicators in research policy and evaluation is widely perceived as problematic. Responding to demands for explicit normative framings in STI governance, I propose an agenda for transforming the place and role of indicators in policy. Given that expert advice should not separate knowledge formation from decision-making under conditions…

This letter documents some problems in Ancaiani et al. (2015). Namely the evaluation of concordance, based on Cohen's kappa, reported by Ancaiani et al. was not computed on the whole random sample of 9,199 articles, but on a subset of 7,597 articles. The kappas relative to the whole random sample were in the range 0.07-0.15, indicating an…