Nature reports this week that the U.S. National Science Foundation is moving toward limiting the number of proposals that a particular university can submit,

“In the past few years, the NSF has placed limits on the number of applications that a single institution can submit. Those limits will now become increasingly common, according to Arden Bement, the agency’s director. He says the measures are needed to control the number of proposals flooding in to his staff, and to boost the success rate of applications. He stresses that the new policy will affect only large facilities and collaborative grants. “This would not be for individual applications,” he says. But universities are starting to speak out about the proposals, warning that the changes are forcing them to become unwilling peer reviewers. Earlier this year, administrators at Princeton University, New Jersey, had to choose one of several proposals for a programme that funded international collaborations, according to Diane Jones, director of the university’s office of government affairs. The proposals came from several disciplines and departments, making the choice far from straightforward. “Universities are not set up to do this kind of internal peer review,” she says.”

In my experience universities are highly politicized places — and I don’t mean here the Republican-Democrat sort of politicization, but the sort of politicization associated with turf, disciplinary status, personal feuds, professorial fiefdoms and horse trading and logrolling. Going further down the path of outsourcing peer review to universities is in my view another step towards a continued diminishment of peer review as an effective tool of decision making about science.