It seems there is growing interest among grant funded scientists to openly share their grant proposals for others in the field to see. This may seem to go against the common practice of keeping such information secret until the results of one’s work are published, but Ethan White of Jabberwocky Ecology gives some compelling reasons why sharing can be much more beneficial.

White argues that openness is “inherently good for science”, in that peer scientists can know about cutting edge research without having to wait years for results to be published to find out about it. This encourages the sharing of ideas and has the added benefit of helping those just starting out in their careers learn by seeing examples of well written proposals.

White outlines other reasons for sharing (in short: Credit, Open Access, Permanence, Version Control) and highlights a tool called figshare that makes it easy to do so, by “allowing researchers to publish all of their research outputs in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner”.

White is certainly not alone in this endeavor, as evidenced by his compiled list of proposals made available by other PIs who share this goal. In fact, Heather Piwowar, a co-founder of total-impact, shared a proposal submitted to (and later granted by) the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and several other recently funded proposals are listed as well.

Although the proposals here focus on the biological sciences (with a link to another list of mathematics grant proposals), the principal behind them applies to all fields of scientific research. As more individuals come to understand the benefits of open sharing, perhaps we will see less secrecy, more collaboration and ultimately more scientific discovery and progress.