Winning over funders through open science - Research Professional News

"Science funders are slowly dismantling the barriers that prevent research outputs from being disseminated beyond the pages of subscription journals. While many researchers welcome this direction of travel, it also has implications for winning funding.

With various funders taking steps to ensure that content is made freely available online, they are increasingly turning the magnifying glass on researchers, looking for evidence that academics are working to ensure their outputs have an impact in the wider world....

Grigorov, a researcher on open science at the Technical University of Denmark, said that solid proposals too often failed because scholars did not give enough thought to incorporating open science in their projects. “I’m surrounded by applicants whose research is excellent and who are very capable of scoring five out of five, but they really lose points on impact,” he said.

Grigorov has firsthand experience, having conducted a workshop for researchers on incorporating open-science practices into grants at his university. “We asked them if they’d let us hack their proposal all the way from research excellence, methods and impacts…to implementation,” he said....

According to Féret, a librarian in charge of open access and research data management at the University of Lille in France, meeting funder expectations on open science is not impossible for researchers but it does require a bit of forethought. Not only that, but flagging open-science provisions in a proposal can bolster a project’s appeal to reviewers...."