Abstract

Recent science funding policy scholars and practitioners have advocated for the use of lotteries, or elements of random chance, as supplementations of traditional peer review for evaluating grant applications. One of the primary motivations for lotteries is their purported openness to innovative research. The purpose of this paper is to argue that current proponents of funding science by lottery overestimate the viability of peer review and thus unduly restrict the scope of lotteries in science funding practice. I further show how this analysis suggests a different way of introducing lotteries into science funding policy.