Science needs a Rejected Grants Archive

Grants are the main source of what keeps biomedical research alive. Scientists apply for whatever money can get, usually from the government, but sometimes from philanthropists and other organizations, to pay salaries and buy equipment and lab supplies.

Award rates tend to hover around 15% (generally speaking) but can be skewed in favor of older, established labs and towards "safer" short term gains in knowledge or application.

Chances are, if you're a scientist, your hard drive dedicates more space to rejected grants than accepted ones.

I've had to bitterly shelve projects that I (and others, I swear) thought could generate major advances. Sometimes getting a rejection is a good thing. It can hone skills to make later applications better. More ambitious or better-thought out science.

But oftentimes a grant will get rejected because of poor writing, not a poor idea, or the subject is a bit over the head of the reviewers, or just plain politics.

While it's difficult to revamp the system or think of alternatives, one thing we might consider doing is creating an archive of the reject pile.

A few benefits:

First, we owe it to the public. Scientists are mostly paid by the taxpayer, and how scientists spend their time should be absolutely transparent. It should also be transparent what kinds of work the NIH is refusing to fund! In a perfect world, the public would see how many good ideas get thrown out and maybe, just maybe, support increasing funds for science overall. (Money in science is currently pitiful and Republicans are always threatening to make it far worse.)

Second, it would serve as a great educational archive. Not only for the public, but for grant writers themselves. We can have examples of how not to present information and get a better sense of what better writing might sound like.

Third, many ideas are good, and many other labs might be better suited to explore them in the future. There is no good reason for a good scientific idea to go unexplored indefinitely. Many hypotheses that would other reamin unheard can also feed into and grow other hypotheses in related or distant fields.

Finally, there is always the odd claim that a rejected grant's idea ends up getting investigated by someone on the grant review board. An archive could be a very simple mechanism to keep people honest.

Could this take off?

I will say I have no idea what the legality of such an archive would be? Who owns a rejected grant?

And would scientists on the whole be willing to release and perhaps lose credit for ideas they've grown very fond of? I personally would! Most of my colleagues are interested in the answers irrespective of who is asking the question or putting in the effort to discover!