Hi James, I agree that it’sa good suggestion. In Sweden when you apply to any of the publicly funded grant agencies the application is automatically in the public domain. This means that anyone can ask to see your proposal and the agency is obliged to send it out to the people asking for it. I’ve used this a couple of times to look at grant proposals within my field as a learning experience.
Best wishes, Ronnie Sent from my iPhone > On 23 Jun 2022, at 03:09, James Holton <jmhol...@lbl.gov> wrote: > > Greetings all, > > I'd like to ask a question that I expect might generate some spirited > discussion. > > We have seen recently a groundswell of support for openness and transparency > in peer review. Not only are pre-prints popular, but we are also seeing > reviewer comments getting published along with the papers themselves. > Sometimes even signed by the reviewers, who would have traditionally remained > anonymous. > > My question is: why don't we also do this for grant proposals? > > I know this is not the norm. However, after thinking about it, why wouldn't > we want the process of how funding is awarded in science to be at least as > transparent as the process of publishing the results? Not that the current > process isn't transparent, but it could be more so. What if applications, and > their reviewer comments, were made public? Perhaps after an embargo period? > There could be great benefits here. New investigators especially, would have > a much clearer picture of format, audience, context and convention. I expect > unsuccessful applications might be even more valuable than successful ones. > And yet, in reality, those old proposals and especially the comments almost > never see the light of day. Monumental amounts of work goes into them, on > both sides, but then get tucked away into the darkest corners of our hard > drives. > > So, 2nd question is: would you do it? Would you upload your application into > the public domain for all to see? What about the reviewer comments? If not, > why not? Afraid people will steal your ideas? Well, once something is > public, its pretty clear who got the idea first. > > 3rd question: what if the service were semi-private? and you got to get > comments on your proposal before submitting it to your funding agency? Would > that be helpful? What if in exchange for that service you had to review 2-3 > other applications? Would that be worth it? > > Or, perhaps, I'm being far too naiive about all this. For all I know there > are some rules against doing this I'm not aware of. Either way, I'm > interested in what this community thinks. Please share your views! On- or > off-list is fine. > > -James Holton > MAD Scientist > > ######################################################################## > > To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 > > This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB, a mailing > list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/ ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/
