I suspect funders will worry about it becoming even harder to find
reviewers - they're already hard to flush out, if I'm not mistaken, and
might become even more reclusive if they run the risk of being pilloried
in public.
If that sounds theoretical: even in this community, for all its
collegiality and friendliness, we pillory one another in public and
print just about our /data/.
Frank
On 23/06/2022 02:08, James Holton 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
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