What would happen if grant reviews were made public? : Nature News & Comment

"Many scientists struggle to understand why some grant applications succeed and others fail, perhaps explaining the online popularity of two articles calling for increased transparency in the grant peer-review process. Researchers are also talking about changing peer review at the other end of the research spectrum: after the results are published. Writing in PLoS Biology1, Daniel Mietchen, an evolutionary biologist at Berlin’s Museum of Natural History, argues that, among other things, all successful proposals and their reviews should be released to the public ... Mietchen makes the case that lifting the curtain on the research-funding system could transform science as a whole. Publishing proposals as soon as they are submitted and seeing which ones were rejected could help scientists to see how their work stacks up against that of their colleagues. It could also open up new avenues for collaboration and allow others to build on failed proposals, he wrote. Even small steps — such as publication of all successful proposals years after the projects have ended — could be an important move towards that goal, he says ..."