A query...

[Miriam Meyerhoff]

Dear Dan,

>In fact, there in Scotland you have access to research grants that 
>far exceed the grants available to linguists from the NSF by and 
>large.

I'm grateful to Dan for opening up the discussion beyond the US (I 
restricted my comments yesterday to the NSF, since at that point the 
contributors were all US-based).

The position of British funding agencies such as AHRC and ESRC (and, 
I believe, also the Canadian SSHRC) is that data collected using 
public money is a public asset, i.e. open access, *SUBJECT TO* the 
usual restrictions re. confidentiality etc., etc., based on 
individual researcher's agreements with the people they are recording.

As far as the question of who has access to more dosh is concerned: 
This is an interesting question, since the average size of the grants 
to academics on the three links you provided seems very similar. My 
impression (based on my own limited experience) is not the 
researchers are more likely to get large sums in the UK, but that the 
success rate for grant submissions is perhaps higher (c. 1:4 
applications funded; I'm not sure what the ratio is for the NSF).

chrz, mm
-- 

Miriam Meyerhoff
Professor of Sociolinguistics
Linguistics & English Language
University of Edinburgh
14 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh EH8 9LN
SCOTLAND, UK

ph. +44 131 651-1836 (direct line); 650-3628 or 651-1842 (main office)
fax: +44 131 650-6883

http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~mhoff/