Last Word on the Discussion regarding the paper "Uncertainty and risk-taking in science: Meaning, measurement and management in peer review of research proposals"

We began this paper out of a desire to develop an understanding of the meaning of risk in science, and create a discourse about its meaning, a topic that we saw as very important and yet not sufficiently developed. Our aim was to have this discussion with the broad group of scientists, scholars and policy makers interested in the science of science (e.g., Fortunato et al., 2018). The wish to speak to this diverse interdisciplinary community is the primary reason for our choice of terms. For example, although we appreciate the distinction between risk and uncertainty that is common in several areas of economics, dating back to Frank Knight (Knight, 1921), we choose to use the terms risk and uncertainty as synonyms and to call ambiguity situations characterized by lack of knowledge. We do this largely to encourage as broad a community as possible to read this work. The same choice led us to refrain from building our notion of risk on constructs, like the dichotomy exploration/exploitation (March, 1991), or metrics, such as novelty (Veugelers et al., 2021) that have a specific disciplinary meaning and would be difficult to understand by those not working in specific disciplines.