The NIH BRAIN Initiative’s Experiment in Team Research

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this useful narrative, the authors attempt to capture their experience of the success of team projects for the scientific community.

Strengths:

The authors are able to draw on a wealth of real-life experience reviewing, funding, and administering large team projects, and assessing how well they achieve their goals.

Weaknesses:

The utility of the RCR as a measure is questionable. I am not sure if this really makes the case for the success of these projects. The conclusions do not depend on Figure 1.

Reviewer #2 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors review the history of the team projects within the Brain initiative and analyze their success in progression to additional rounds of funding and their bibliographic impact.

Strengths:

The history of the team projects and the fact that many had renewed funding and produced impactful papers is well documented.

Weaknesses:

The core bibliographic and funding impact results have largely been reported in the companion manuscript and so represent "double dipping" I presume the slight disagreement in the number of grants (by one) represents a single grant that was not deemed to address systems/computational neuroscience. The single figure is relatively uninformative. The domains of study are sufficiently large and overlapping that there seems to be little information gained from the graphic and the Sankey plot could be simply summarized by rates of competing success.

Author response:

eLife Assessment

The manuscript presents some useful accounts of experiences funding team projects within the BRAIN Initiative. These would be more appropriate to add to the companion manuscript since the present manuscript contains some overlapping analyses and does not stand well on its own. Therefore the evidence supporting the conclusions is incomplete.

We appreciate the feedback on merging both manuscripts into one and have followed the advice in this version.

Public Reviews:

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this useful narrative, the authors attempt to capture their experience of the success of team projects for the scientific community.

Strengths:

The authors are able to draw on a wealth of real-life experience reviewing, funding, and administering large team projects, and assessing how well they achieve their goals.

Weaknesses:

The utility of the RCR as a measure is questionable. I am not sure if this really makes the case for the success of these projects. The conclusions do not depend on Figure 1.

We respectfully disagree about the utility of the RCR, particularly because it is metric that is normalized by both year and topical area. We have added a more detailed description of how the RCR is calculated on page 6-7. Please note that figure 1 is aimed to highlight the funding opportunities, investments and number of awards associated with small lab (exploratory) versus team (elaborated, mature) research rather than a description of publication metrics.

Reviewer #2 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors review the history of the team projects within the Brain initiative and analyze their success in progression to additional rounds of funding and their bibliographic impact.

Strengths:

The history of the team projects and the fact that many had renewed funding and produced impactful papers is well documented.

Weaknesses:

The core bibliographic and funding impact results have largely been reported in the companion manuscript and so represent "double dipping" I presume the slight disagreement in the number of grants (by one) represents a single grant that was not deemed to address systems/computational neuroscience. The single figure is relatively uninformative. The domains of study are sufficiently large and overlapping that there seems to be little information gained from the graphic and the Sankey plot could be simply summarized by rates of competing success.

While we sincerely appreciate the feedback, we chose to retain these plots on domains and models to provide a sense of the broad spectrum of research topics contained in our TeamBCP awards. Further details on the awards can be derived from the award links provided in the text. Additionally, we retained the Sankey plots because these are a visual depiction of how awards transition from one mechanism to another, evolve in their funding sources, and advance in their research trajectories. The plot is an example of our continuity analysis which is only reported in the text and not visually shown for the remaining BCP programs.