While I personally do not mind people abusing the system being called out, in this case I am not sure that is an issue. Is there any purpose in allowing people to submit more than six?
The process itself can require multiple submissions for the same grant. From my reading of the article, initial submissions, revisions, or renewals will all count as a “submission”. Additionally, if you are part of a collaboration (program project), that will count too. The concern here is that with these caps in place, you’ll see a pull back from collaborative efforts (which are normally looked on favorably).
The main gripe isn’t the fact that there is a limit, but rather that the threshold is too low. If you doubled the threshold to 12, I don’t think you’d see much pushback and still be able to limit over submissions. This being NIH, I’m a bit surprised there wasn’t more data presented to show why 6 was a reasonable limit.
The real problem seems to me to be that revisions etc. count as submissions and they are not limiting the submissions count to where you are PI. Six PI submissions per year seems plenty enough, though there are some PIs with a crazy number of grad students, post docs, etc. but hey, spread the PI responsibilities to post docs or whatever.
