As I announced on Twitter about a week ago, I am now making all of my grant proposals open access. To start with I’m doing this for all of my sole-PI proposals, because I don’t have to convince my collaborators to participate in this rather aggressively open style of science. At the moment this includes three funded proposals: my NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship proposal, an associated Research Starter Grant proposal, and my NSF CAREER award.

So, why am I doing this, especially with the CAREER award that still has several years left on it and some cool ideas that we haven’t worked on yet. I’m doing it for a few reasons. First, I think that openness is inherently good for science. While there may be benefits for me in keeping my ideas secret until they are published, this certainly doesn’t benefit science more broadly. By sharing our proposals the cutting edge of scientific thought will no longer be hidden from view for several years and that will allow us to make more rapid progress. Second, I think having examples of grants available to young scientists has the potential to help them learn how to write good proposals (and other folks seem to agree) and therefore decrease the importance of grantsmanship relative to cool science in the awarding of limited funds. Finally, I just think that folks deserve to be able to see what their tax dollars are paying for, and to be able to compare what I’ve said I will do to what I actually accomplish. I’ve been influenced in my thinking about this by posts by several of the big open science folks out there including Titus Brown, Heather Piwowar, and Rod Page.

To make my grants open access I chose to use figshare for several reasons.

1. Credit. Figshare assigns a DOI to all of its public objects, which means that you can easily cite them in scientific papers. If someone gets an idea out of one of my proposals and works on it before I do, this let’s them acknowledge that fact. Stats are also available for views, shares, and (soon) citations, making it easier to track the impact of your larger corpus of research outputs.
2. Open Access. All public written material is licensed under CC-BY (basically just cite the original work) allowing folks to do cool things without asking.
3. Permanence. I can’t just change my mind and delete the proposal and I also expect that figshare will be around for a long time.
4. Version control. For proposals that are not funded, revised, not funded, revised, etc. figshare allows me to post multiple versions of the proposal while maintaining the previous versions for posterity/citation.

During this process I’ve come across several other folks doing similar things and even inspired others to post their proposals, so I’m in the process of compiling a list of all of the publicly available biology proposals that I’m aware of and will post a list with links soon. It’s my hope that this will serve as a valuable resource for young and old researchers alike and will help to lead the way forward to a more open scientific dialogue.