Open Grantsmithing?
June 2, 2011
Some Open Science wackaloon has posted a grant application that he plans to submit here
Now, there is no value I see in the pre-publication of a grant application you haven’t submitted yet. I’m not seeing the purpose of this, particularly for my operation.
The fleeting thought I had was whether I would be willing to post
1) old grant proposals that went unfunded
2) old grant proposals that were funded but we’ve dropped that line in my laboratory
3) grant proposals funding our current work
The point being my usual desire to help folks understand the granting process. The occasional handful of grant samples posted on IC websites can’t cover the breadth of NIH applicants, so perhaps more examples would be useful.
I have a pretty strong aversion to doing this and am going to have to explore why that is the case.
DrugMonkey 
June 2, 2011 at 6:25 am
Well, I pretty freely give out my K99 application to anyone who requests it, including its previous unfunded versions and the summary statements that went with it, and I include a statement in my emails that CSR will screen applications for similarity to others so none of the content of the proposal should be used in any form. So far I have shared it with at least a hundred people, and haven’t seen any spookily similar K99s get funded yet. I wouldn’t really have a problem sharing this kind of past work.
But I wouldn’t open up my upcoming proposals, partly because of the potential for somebody to do what I want to do faster than I can get funded for it, but mainly because it creates the potential for a conflict of interest for reviewers who might accidentally come across it before the review meeting.
LikeLike
June 2, 2011 at 7:41 am
Given that study section X might think your grant worthy of funding on day Y, but not on subsequent day Z ( all those resubmissions with worse scores than the original application), I’m not sure that posting successful applications online would be particularly enlightening. On the other hand failed applications that you think were fairly rejected might be more useful to newcomers to the field.
LikeLike
June 2, 2011 at 7:46 am
WHAT!?!???? “fairly rejected”?
Not MY applications homes. Each and every one was a work of rare genius and that !@$$;$;&: reviewer number 3 set science back by decades by rejecting it!
LikeLike
June 2, 2011 at 8:17 am
I have considered, on several occasions, posting old grants that were either never funded or for projects that we have let go but have ultimately decided not to. I would have posted them on my personal webpage and not my blog. I decided not to post them because I might try to come back to them one of these days and I don’t want to give the ideas (crappy as they are undoubtedly are) away.
I also can’t think of any possible benefit of posting an as yet unreviewed grant on your blog/webpage for the world to see.
LikeLike
June 2, 2011 at 5:17 pm
I have no problem distributing my grant applications and would be happy to post them on the Internet: funded and not.
LikeLike