Ask a bunch of scientists what’s wrong with their field, as Vox did a few years ago, and one thing nearly all of them will name is the funding process. You might think that top scientists at top universities are paid by those universities for the research they do, but for the most part, you’d be wrong: Nearly all academic researchers in the sciences rely on outside grants in order to pay salaries, buy their equipment, and run their experiments.

Those grants end up powerfully shaping the academic sciences. By some estimates, many top researchers spend 50 percent of their time writing grants. Interdisciplinary research is less likely to get funding, meaning critical kinds of research don’t get done. And scientists argue that the constant fighting for funding undermines good work by encouraging researchers to overpromise and engage in questionable practices, overincentivizing publication in top journals, disincentivizing replications of existing work, and stifling creativity and intellectual risk-taking.

A new biomedical research institute, called the Arc Institute, announced on Wednesday as a nonprofit in collaboration between Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco and funded by some of the biggest names in tech, is meant to address some of those problems — and show what could be a better way to fund science.

Arc is “an institutional experiment in how science is conducted and funded,” Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and one of the Institute’s funders, told me. Researchers get eight-year grants to do whatever they want, instead of three-year grants tied to a specific project.

The institute is also hiring for people who want to work on improving key biological research tools instead of on conducting experiments and writing papers. It’s an expensive approach that can, even at best, only solve the problems with our current system for a tiny fraction of the researchers affected by it. But its founders hope it can at least show that solutions are possible — and inspire further experimentation.

Read the full article about research fundraising by Kelsey Piper at Vox.