By Valrie Minson
Imagine a young researcher working late into the night on a grant proposal for a groundbreaking project. This intrepid researcher has a brilliant idea but lacks experience in crafting a compelling proposal. Despite searching online and asking colleagues for examples, there are limited resources to help write the strongest proposal possible. Now, picture an open repository where a researcher can easily access successful grant proposals, complete with reviews and feedback. This repository guides others in writing strong proposals and inspires confidence and a sense of belonging in the academic community. This is the vision of Open Grants.
Anyone who has written a grant knows that navigating the process to secure funding and fellowships—from project ideation to submission to award—requires significant time and energy from the co-authors, reviewers, and grant professionals. Despite this collaborative effort, the grant proposals often remain inaccessible to those outside the grants-making process, hindering public and scholarly access due to lack of previous infrastructure and a culture of privacy and lack of transparency. This inaccessibility poses a barrier to utilizing such materials as examples for proposal writing or as scholarly objects documenting the research process over time.
In August 2021, Hao Ye (former UF Reproducibility Librarian and STEM postdoctoral researcher) and Perry Collins (former UF Scholarly Communications Librarian) were awarded more than $99,000 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to explore the development of digital infrastructure to archive and share proposal documents and metadata for grants and fellowships. The team also included Valrie Minson (P.I. in 2024), Xiaoli Ma (Co-PI), and Chris Nicolich (Co-P.I).
The Planning for Open Grants Final Deliverables Report underscores the importance of accessibility in the grant-making process. By creating an open repository of funding proposals, scholars can recognize these documents as scholarly products, improve public access, and bring much-needed transparency to the research process. The initiative’s findings and recommendations pave the way for a more equitable and accessible future in grant funding.
Special thanks to those whose work inspired this project, especially the creators and maintainers of Open Grants, established in 2017 by Ethan White, Bess de Farber, and Laurie Taylor. This project was made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grants for Libraries program.