This file helps to collect information about ways in which research funding could be made more open.
The scope here, for the time being, is any aspect of the funding process, starting from the first inception of an idea, includes the grant drafting, submission and reviewing procedures as well as announcements about awards, calls or any communications about the progress of funded projects or their assessment, as well as long-term archival and citations or other forms of reuse of the research outputs produced from some specific line of funding.
General outlines of ideas in this regard are available through
Some platforms that already open up some aspects of the funding process are described in the following posts:
- Wikimedia grants
- Journal of Brief Ideas
- Introducing ThinkLab — A platform for massively collaborative open science
- HHS IDEA Lab
- RIO Journal
- Open Public Review — public peer review of deliverables of H2020 projects around public policy
- ZcashFoundation
- funds software development
- list of 2018 Q2 submissions
The educational value of open grant proposals is highlighted in
- How to find grant proposal samples?,
which also links to numerous examples of grant proposals that have already been made public.
- historic: Scottish Book
- Millennium Prize Problems
- Longitude Prize
- Jisc Elevator
- NIH: Sample Applications and Summary Statements
- Polymath project
- Maths proposals
- Biology proposals
- e-Health proposals
- Unsubmitted proposal made public
- Internet banking proposal
- Wikidata for Research
- CONQUAIRE: Continuous quality control for research data to ensure reproducibility: an institutional approach
- How are preprint servers/ repositories being used for grant proposals?
- Chemistry Crowdsourcing and Open Notebook Science - on Nature Precedings
- Others:
- Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) runs FUNding Friday Projects and Poster Competitions at their annual meeting; winners get up to USD 5k
- QMEE CDT Project proposal database (abstracts)
- NIH Grants Policy Statement
- with changes as of March 2015 (only supplied as PDF, not available in machine readable form or as diff)
- Reminder About Your Responsibilities in Maintaining the Integrity of NIH Peer Review
- "We all share the same objective: ensuring a fair review, free of bias, so that the most meritorious applications are identified for funding consideration by NIH. The peer review system belongs to the entire biomedical research community, not just to NIH — let’s do all we can as a community to preserve its integrity."
- This listing is not meant to be complete, but suggestions for additions are most welcome.
- Disaster Health Information Outreach and Collaboration Project 2015 (RFQ No. NIHLM2015383)
- RFA-CA-15-006 "Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Advancing Biomedical Science Using Crowdsourcing and Interactive Digital Media (UH2)."
- not foreseen in/ compatible with applicable law
- interference from lobbyists
- What is the impact of research funding on research productivity?
- An efficient system to fund science: from proposal review to peer-to-peer distributions
- Fantasy Science Funding
- To Apply or Not to Apply: A Survey Analysis of Grant Writing Costs and Benefits
- "We find that the average proposal takes 116 PI hours and 55 CI hours to write; although time spent writing was not related to whether the grant was funded. Effort did translate into success, however, as academics who wrote more grants received more funding."
- "Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant"
- my notes
- "Baseline funding, in which each researcher gets the same amount per year (Gordon, 1993; Poulin and Gordon, 2001). This protects each scientist from peer review. It is open to the objection that some scientists will do nothing useful with the money, and so it needs some modest checks and balances, such as requiring a public accounting of what research was accomplished. It also underfunds expensive research."
- Collective allocation of science funding: from funding agencies to scientific agency
- "We investigate a class of funding models in which all participants receive an equal portion of yearly funding, but are then required to anonymously donate a fraction of their funding to peers. The funding thus flows from one participant to the next, each acting as if he or she were a funding agency themselves. Here we show through a simulation conducted over large-scale citation data (37M articles, 770M citations) that such a distributed system for science may yield funding patterns similar to existing NIH and NSF distributions, but may do so at much lower overhead while exhibiting a range of other desirable features. "
- Crowdfunding Scientific Research
- see corresponding section in crowdsourcing.md
- Ten Simple Rules for Getting Grants
- perhaps follow up on this with "Ten Simple Rules for Drafting Grant Proposals in Public"?
- similar: Twenty tips for writing a research proposal
- Public information available about NIH grants, as per RePORT
- cannot be searched by individual or by past vs ongoing grants
- Sandpit/ Ideas lab
- Registered Reports
- Medical Hypotheses
- great paper on incentives
- Swedish Vetenskapsradet moves towards more openness
- "in FY 2012 – 2014, NSF conducted several pilot activities incorporating different variations of the more familiar approaches to merit review. Table 15 lists these pilots"
- Mechanism design: "One result of this approach is that proposals received a more comprehensive review than had [..] previously been the norm for this program."
- Currently open calls at NIH
- Grant agencies versus the search for truth
- "peer recognition rather than peer review"
- Experiment.com
- Gratipay
- NHS Research has patients to review proposals
- Healing the NIH-Funded Biomedical Research Enterprise
- Is our funding system still fit for purpose?
- although focused on the arts, some good suggestions here that are applicable more widely
- A New Funding Ecology for Social Change
- commentary
- Ingenuity Unleashed: The spur of the Knight Challenge | Editorial
- Real-life cognition challenge (a prize of EUR 5k for "studying the brain's behavior in situations with near-real-life complexity")
- Young researchers' perspective on NIH funding
- Point of view: Strategies from UW-Madison for rescuing biomedical research in the US
- with useful set of Guiding themes and principles
- Burden of Disease and NIH Funding Priorities
- List of highest funded crowdfunding projects
- Towards an analytical understanding of peer review in research funding
- "we’ve decided to remove eligibility criteria based on years of postdoctoral experience"
- Projects recently funded by the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute
- On Decreasing Returns to Scale in Research Funding
- Think about a Grant Discovery Index beyond systems like the NIH RePORTER
- Ethereum
- allows for decentralized funding
- A call to fund people not proposals triggers strong reactions online
- Open Budget Data
- Book Review: The Research Funding Toolkit
- ERC Proof of Concept grants
- A Plethora of Open Data Repositories (i.e., thousands!)
- Research body calls for more funding for ‘free research’
- Transparency in Quartiermeister brewery
- Grant application rejected over choice of font
- Breaking the grant cycle: on the rational allocation of public resources to scientific research projects
- Fundable, but not funded: How can research funders ensure ‘unlucky’ applications are handled more appropriately?
- "How can we ensure ‘unlucky’ applications are handled more appropriately?
- Should funders be more honest about their financial capacity to fund, and look towards publicising supportable but unfunded grants to other funding bodies?
- Does this idea support the notion of publicly available grant applications?
- How can we address the limitations of peer review in funding decisions and look towards more objective ways to allocate funding? Or is peer review the best option available to the issues faced by funders with shrinking budgets?"
- Billions lost in bids to secure EU research funding
- full report expected for November
- Grantome
- "Contractor at my house just gave me a discount for being a cancer scientist."
- Lack of transparency in ERC funding decisions
- Aaron Swartz and the Price of Information
- Liberapay "Liberapay is a recurrent donations platform [to] help you fund the creators and projects you appreciate."
- Should research funding be allocated at random?
- Abstracts of both failed and successful ERC starting grant applications 2014-2016 (FOI request to ERC, denied)
- pretix — FLOSS suite for handling ticket sales, including transparent display of conference funding situation
- A look at Participatory Budgeting