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Showing which proposals do and don't receive federal funding can improve research and advance open science.
In 2022, as part of an ongoing assignment from Congress, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine set out to evaluate if a set of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to fuel science start-ups worked as intended. The aim was to determine whether Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants spur productive collaborations, technology transfer, and economic benefits-but NIH refused to share how applications to both grant programs were ranked (and thus funded) by the expert review panels tasked with evaluating them, hindering the Academies' efforts. "Although the committee requested priority score information from NIH, this information was not provided because of confidentiality concerns," the report read. "If future analyses are to be more robust and enable stronger statements on program impact, NIH will need to find a way to provide this information to researchers, as it and other agencies have done in the past."
Something very similar happened with the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 2023, the Academies called out NSF for not meeting its legal obligation to share data: "Granting access to data on all applicants for program assessment purposes, as is called for in the legislation mandating this review, and establishing processes that would allow for structured evaluation of policies and procedures would help NSF understand the effectiveness of its initiatives and how its programs could be improved."
Despite expectations from policymakers and statutes that data from science agencies be available for analysis, both of us-longtime open science advocates who have worked in various government and industry positions and who are writing only in our personal capacities and not on behalf of anyone else-have heard top researchers complain that they can't get access to information on unfunded proposals, or, on the rare occasions when they do, access is conditional on allowing the agency to veto any publications using the data.
Without knowing what proposals go unfunded, there is no way to know whether agencies are supporting a wide range of ideas or favoring a narrow theory. Are "high-risk, high reward" proposals getting a chance? Have hard-won changes in grant policies actually helped early-career researchers? Do the questions researchers ask change...