Emerging Technology

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Open scientific grant proposals to advance innovation, collaboration, and evidence-based policy

02.06.24 | 5 min read | Text by Jordan Dworkin

Grant writing is a significant part of a scientist’s work. While time-consuming, this process generates a wealth of innovative ideas and in-depth knowledge. However, much of this valuable intellectual output — particularly from the roughly 70% of unfunded proposals — remains unseen and underutilized. The default secrecy of scientific proposals is based on many valid concerns, yet it represents a significant loss of potential progress and a deviation from government priorities around openness and transparency in science policy. Facilitating public accessibility of grant proposals could transform them into a rich resource for collaboration, learning, and scientific discovery, thereby significantly enhancing the overall impact and efficiency of scientific research efforts.

We recommend that funding agencies implement a process by which researchers can opt to make their grant proposals publicly available. This would enhance transparency in research, encourage collaboration, and optimize the public-good impacts of the federal funding process.

Details

Scientists spend a great deal of time, energy, and effort writing applications for grant funding. Writing grants has been estimated to take roughly 15% of a researcher’s working hours and involves putting together an extensive assessment of the state of knowledge, identifying key gaps in understanding that the researcher is well-positioned to fill, and producing a detailed roadmap for how they plan to fill that knowledge gap over a span of (typically) two to five years. At major federal funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF), the success rate for research grant applications tends to fall in the range of 20%–30%.

The upfront labor required of scientists to pursue funding, and the low success rates of applications, has led some to estimate that ~10% of scientists’ working hours are “wasted.” Other scholars argue that the act of grant writing is itself a valuable and generative process that produces spillover benefits by incentivizing research effort and informing future scholarship. Under either viewpoint, one approach to reducing the “waste” and dramatically increasing the benefits of grant writing is to encourage proposals — both funded and unfunded — to be released as public goods, thus unlocking the knowledge, frontier ideas, and roadmaps for future research that are currently hidden from view.

The idea of grant proposals being made public is a sensitive one. Indeed, there are valid reasons for keeping proposals confidential, particularly when they contain intellectual property or proprietary information, or when they are in the early stages of development. However, these reasons do not apply to all proposals, and many potential concerns only apply for a short time frame. Therefore, neither full disclosure nor full secrecy are optimal; a more flexible approach that encourages researchers to choose when and how to share their proposals could yield significant benefits with minimal risks.

The potential benefits to the scientific community, and science funders include:

• Encouraging collaboration by making promising unfunded ideas and shared interests discoverable by disparate researchers
• Supporting early-career scientists by giving them access to a rich collection of successful and unsuccessful proposals from which to learn
• Facilitating cutting-edge science-of-science research to unlock policy-relevant knowledge about research programs and scientific grantmaking
• Allowing for philanthropic crowd-in by creating a transparent and searchable marketplace of grant proposals that can attract additional or alternative funding
• Promoting efficiency in the research planning and budgeting process by increasing transparency
• Giving scientists, science funders, and the public a view into the whole of early-stage scientific thought, above and beyond the outputs of completed projects.

Recommendations 

Federal funding agencies should develop a process to allow and encourage researchers to share their grant proposals publicly, within existing infrastructures for grant reporting (e.g., NIH RePORTER). Sharing should be minimally burdensome and incorporated into existing application frameworks. The process should be flexible, allowing researchers to opt in or out — and to specify other characteristics like embargoes — to ensure applicants’ privacy and intellectual property concerns are mitigated. 

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should develop a framework for publicly sharing grant proposals.

• OMB’s Evidence Team — in partnership with federal funding agencies (e.g., NIH, NSF, NASA, DOE) — should review statutory and regulatory frameworks to determine whether there are legal obstacles to sharing proposal content for extramural grant applications with applicant permission. 
• OMB should then issue a memo clarifying the manner in which agencies can make proposals public and directing agencies to develop plans to allow and encourage the public availability of scientific grant proposals, in alignment with the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act and the “Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking.”

The NSF should run a focused pilot program to assess opportunities and obstacles for proposal sharing across disciplines.

• NSF’s Division of Institution and Award Support (DIAS) should work with at least three directorates to launch a pilot study assessing applicants’ perspectives on proposal sharing, their perceived risks and concerns, and disciplinary differences in applicants’ views.
• The National Science Board (NSB) should produce a report outlining the findings of the pilot study and the implications for optimal approaches to facilitating public access of grant proposals.

Based on the NSB’s report, OSTP and OMB should work with federal funding agencies to refine and implement a proposal-sharing process across agencies.

• OSTP should work with funding agencies to develop a unified application section where researchers can indicate their release preferences. The group should agree on a set of shared parameters to align the request across agencies. For example, the guidelines should establish:
  • A set of embargo options, such that applicants can choose to make their proposal available after, for example, 2, 5, or 10 years
  • Whether the sharing of proposals can be made conditional on acceptance/rejection
  • When in the application process applicants should be asked to opt in or out, and an approach for allowing applicants to revise their decision following submission
• OMB should include public access for grant proposals as a budget priority, emphasizing its potential benefits for bolstering innovation, efficiency, and government data availability. It should also provide guidance and technical assistance to agencies on how to implement the open grants process and require agencies to provide evidence of their plans to do so.

To learn more about the importance of opening science and to read the rest of the published memos, visit the Open Science Policy sprint landing page.