For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their content , rather than counting the applicants’ previous publications. However, not all of DFG’s panels seem to be on board.

Update, Dec. 4, 2015: With the online discussion moving towards grantsmanship and the decision of what level of expertise to expect from a reviewer, I have written down some thoughts on this angle of the discussion. With more and more evaluations, assessments and quality control, the peer-review burden has skyrocketed in recent years.

Skinner used the term “schedules of reinforcement” to describe broad categories of reward patterns which come to reliably control the behavior of his experimental animals. For instance, when he rewarded rats for pressing a lever at a given interval after the last reinforcement (i.e., fixed interval; FI), the animals would pause pressing the lever until just before the interval was over and then start pressing the lever like mad.