A list of publicly available grant proposals in the biological sciences

UPDATE: If you’re looking for publicly available grants go check out our new Open Grants website at https://www.ogrants.org/. It has way more grants and is searchable so that you can quickly find the grants most useful to you.

Recently a bunch of folks in the biological sciences have started sharing their grant proposals openly. Their reasons for doing so are varied (see the links next to their names below), but part of the common justification is a general interest in opening up science so that all stages of the process can benefit from better interaction and communication, and part of it is to provide examples for younger scientists writing grants. To help accomplish both of these goals I’m going to do what Titus Brown suggested and compile a list of all of the available open proposals in the biological sciences (if you’re looking for math proposals they have a list too). Given the limited number of proposals available at the moment I’m just going to maintain the list here, sorted alphabetically by PI. Another way to find proposals is to look at the ‘grant’ and ‘proposal’ tags on figshare, where several of us have been posting proposals. If you know of more proposals, decide to post some yourself, or have corrections to proposal in the list, just let me know in the comments and I’ll keep the list updated. Enjoy!

B. Arman Aksoy (@armish)

Casey Bergman (@caseybergman)

Dave Bridges (

Titus Brown (@ctitusbrown; read Titus’ thoughts on sharing proposals)

Scott Chamberlain (@recology_)

Endymion D. Cooper (@EndymionCooper)

Karen Cranston (@kcranstn)

Kelly Dawe

Morgan Ernest (@skmorgane)

Edmund (Ted) Harte (@DistribEcology)

Jan Jensen (@janhjensen; read Jan’s thoughts on sharing proposals)

Paula Mabee

Rod Page (@rdmpage; read Rod’s thoughts on sharing proposals)

David Pappano (@djpappano)

Heather Piwowar (@researchremix) & Jason Priem (@jasonpriem) (read their thoughts on sharing proposals)

Rosie Redfield (@RosieRedfield)

Andrey Revyakin

Jeff Ross-Ibarra

Menno Schilthuizen (@schilthuizen)

Delia S. Shelton

Andrew Su (@andrewsu)

Sarah Supp (@srsupp)

Tracy Teal (@tracykteal)

Andrew Tredennick (@ATredennick)

Heroen Verbruggen

Todd Vision (@tjvision)

Detlef Weigel (@PlantEvolution)

Ethan White (@ethanwhite; read Ethan’s thoughts on sharing proposals)

49 Comments on “A list of publicly available grant proposals in the biological sciences

  1. UPDATE: Apparently I got distracted by my toddler last night before adding in all of the twitter handles for folks who have made grants available. That has now been corrected.

    It’s also worth noting that because this is a list I’ll keep updating the post and to make things easier I’ll just note updates in the comments rather than attempting to keep a change log in the post itself.

  2. Thanks for putting this together Ethan! And for inspiring me to join in.

  3. Here are three of mine (Karen Cranston, @kcranstn)
    * NSF AVATOL 2011, “Automated and community synthesis of the tree of life”, http://opentree.wikispaces.com/Grant+Proposal
    * NAF ABI 2010, “Towards a comprehensive, community-owned and sustainable repository of reusable phylogenetic knowledge”, http://www.evoio.org/wiki/ABI_2011_proposal
    * NSF INTEROP 2009, “A network for enabling community-driven standards to link evolution into the global web of data (EvoIO)”, http://www.evoio.org/wiki/NSF_INTEROP_2009

  4. BTW @kcranstn’s AVAToL proposal is funded. (The other two are not – oddly those are the ones I’m co-PI on…)

    The Dryad proposals (PI: @tjvision) have been available (and both were/are funded):
    http://wiki.datadryad.org/NSF_grant_2008-2012
    http://wiki.datadryad.org/NSF_grant_2012-2016

    The current Phenoscape grant (PIs: P. Mabee and @tjvision) has been, too:

    Click to access File:Phenoscape_Project_description_refs.pdf

    I thought the first one had been too, but I can’t find it posted now.

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  7. UPDATE: Added Andrew Tredennick’s funded NASA predoc proposal.
    UPDATE to comment: correctly indicated both here and in the page that is was a predoc proposal.

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  9. Don’t know if any of you have considered this, but you need a signed FERPA release to post the names of any students (including grad) and/or postdocs publicly, as in these grant proposals.

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  12. Thanks @andrewsu. It’s been added.

    UPDATE: Added Andrew Su’s Gene Wiki proposal and Ethan White’ Moore Investigator in Data Driven Discovery proposal.

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  15. Thanks Endymion! I’ve added it to the list.

    UPDATE: Added Endymion Cooper’s fellowship to the list.

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  20. Ross – thanks for the contribution and sorry for the delay in getting it up. I’ve posted all of the grants at that link that I had enough metadata about.

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  22. Hello, I was trying to access David Pappano’s Leakey Foundation grant but seems like the link is broken. Is there any other place I could access it by chance? Thank you so much for creating this wonderful website! It is really helpful for early career researchers such as myself.

  23. Thanks for your patience. All of the open grants work has moved to https://www.ogrants.org/ which has all of the most up to date information. Unfortunately it looks like that proposal isn’t there, probably because the link broke at some point and we couldn’t reach the original poster to get it put back on the web.

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