Frank's Blog

Not a document that has any long-term value to society Success rates are low so it is rational to expect your grant will be rejected. It’s hard to motivate yourself to write material that’s likely to go nowhere. Papers can get resubmitted and eventually accepted. Grants typically can’t. It is quite motivating to be writing a paper with knowledge that it will be out there for a community to read and get value from. No resubmission EPSRC has a no resubmission policy. EU allows resubmission, but in practice a consortium will break up and not have stamina for many resubmissions. Also the field and the funder’s requirements change, so sometimes resubmissions require substantial new work (and scrapping old work). Writing a paper is more motivating because your effort will end up going somewhere, even if not this time. Constant rewriting You get one shot and anyone can shoot you down for a tiny thing. Therefore you really have to get opinions from mock reviewers to try to pre-empt the problem...

(I’m talking about UK or EU government funding.) The problem Thousands of researchers all across Europe are spending huge amounts of time writing detailed project proposals for projects that will never get funded. Success rates vary by the scheme, but around 10% get funded. The proposals are long and detailed and take a lot of time to write. UK national funding has the same problem, although rates are a bit higher and documents shorter. But they still waste a huge amount of time (of researchers who are highly trained, representing a big investment from society). Governments should avoid wasting researchers’ time writing detailed proposals for projects that will never be funded. In the UK case EPSRC explicitly say they want to slow people down by making them make a new proposal rather than resubmit (think of the case where you had one nasty reviewer, or a reviewer felt you had one missing component in your proposal - you can’t just add that and resubmit). It is not the case that proposa...