Design Our Future Grant Fund
Help us take open science to the next level by entering our co-design competition!
This year, we ran our first £10,000 Research Grant Competition. We’d like to run it again. But, we want to make the competition more open, and fair, while moving towards our overall vision.
Our Overall Vision
- There are real problems with the systems that administer research funding, supervise peer reviews and publish scientific content.
- We want to help address these problems by creating a radically different scientific funding and content system, which is governed entirely by the principles of open science. (More on that in later blog posts!)
- The first step in this process is designing a completely open, fair and robust grant allocation process, where we’d provide funding, but you’d decide where it goes.
- So, we need your help. We’re opening a co-design competition where you can design the process you’d like to see, and win £1000 in Prolific credit.
Let’s work together to open science for good!
The next bit is about assessing the entries. If you’d like to enter, find out more here 
The Community’s Role
To enter, applicants will post their short proposals on this forum , where you can assess them and vote for the best ones. Our team will then review the 10 proposals with the most votes , and award the prize in accordance with our evaluation criteria.
How do you assess proposals?
Please try to be as fair, and impartial as possible. Think about the following things when evaluating a proposal:
- Does it make good use of our community platform’s features like voting, replying, and liking?
- Is it easy for researchers to get involved in?
- Does it minimize online manipulation/gaming?
- Does it adhere to the principles of open science?
- Does it filter for high-quality submissions?
- Does it ensure that grants are awarded fairly, and according to merit?
Proposals will be posted on our dedicated channel over the coming weeks as separate topics, and you’ll be able to vote for your favourites from Dec 1st.
When is the deadline? And when are winners announced?
Proposals can be posted from today (Nov 8th) until Nov 30th at midnight (GMT).
After that deadline, there will be a 10-day voting-only period:
- From Dec 1st - 11th, all proposals will be available for evaluation and voting only.
- We won’t be accepting new entries during this time.
We will take a couple of weeks to assess the applications and announce the winners on the forum, our blog, social media and email as soon as possible.
If you’ve got any questions, let me know!