Recently, an article was published in PNAS that illustrates the funding situation in the United States and demonstrates how it has become increasingly difficult for young scientists to obtain research grants. The article reminded me of the attempts our organization undertook to get various projects funded. One of these attempts is described in this article.

The numbers provided by Daniels in his PNAS paper “A generation at risk: Young investigators and the future of the biomedical workforce” (1) are dramatic. For instance, if you had a medical degree and applied for an NIH grant, in 1980 you would get the funding by the age of 38 in average. In 2013, you would be 45. You can read the full paper and recommendations made by the author here.

Reading this paper made me remember the attempts we, the founders of Life Science Network gGmbH, undertook to get our projects funded, for instance to fund the development of this platform, lifescience.net. The attempts included two grant applications submitted to European Commission, one grant application submitted to DFG, and over 30 smaller applications and inquiries submitted to different organisations through various funding programs. Nearly all our applications were rejected. Ironically, the only support we got was by Google through their Grants for Non-profits program. All other organisations that are much more vocal about their goals to advance science, decided not to support our initiative.

What seems to be repeatedly indicated as a reason for rejection, is the fact we are not as established as the typical organisations receiving funding. Being a young organisation set up by young researchers, it seems we are facing a similar problem in EU, as Daniels describes is the case in US.

To give you a clearer picture, I am going to describe our latest experience, an attempt to get funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).

Applying to DFG

In 2014, DFG launched a call “Open Access Transformation”. After reading the call description, we realized the call is more about Open Science than Open Access and decided to apply with a project called “SPLICE—An experimental approach towards a web-native publication format”. In the project we proposed to build a prototype of digital infrastructure for web-native publishing and dissemination of knowledge and to create a roadmap towards implementation of Open Science. The concept was developed together with John Lock.

The proposal was submitted and soon we received the first letter with issues DFG felt needed to be addressed before they send the proposal for review. After several rounds of email exchange, our proposal was finally rejected without review.

The final reasons for the rejection can be seen in the email we received:

“The DFG would require from any eligible institution that it provides a basic funding to carry out research or infrastructure projects from that funding – with employees of its own. Moreover, the funding needed to be provided on a regular basis (not on a one-off basis). Finally, we must be sure that the organization will exist for a number of years, at least for a minimum number of 10 to 15 years.”

Of course, these conditions were not listed in the original call for applications, which only stated that “… non-profit research information infrastructure facilities such as libraries, archives, museums, computer centres and media centres are eligible to submit proposals...”.

Obviously, no start-up can guarantee to exist in 10 to 15 years. But the fact that DFG imposes silly and unfair funding requirements that discriminate young organisations such as ours is just one of the problems. The bigger problem is their incompetence in defining and launching their calls, which cost applicants a lot of energy and time, only to find out they were not eligible to apply in the first place. We believe all conditions applicants must fulfill should be clearly indicated in the calls from the beginning.

The worst part is that our proposal wasn't even reviewed. It might be a total nonsense, or it might be really good. The end result is that the DFG is going to give taxpayers' money to established organisations. Are their projects good or bad? Who knows. One might browse the DFG web pages and stumble over abstracts of projects they fund, but what is really behind those projects, we'll never know.

What did we learn

To be fair to DFG, their administrators were very friendly and responded quickly to all our inquires and emails. This is totally opposite to our experience with grant applications submitted to European Commission, for instance. The DFG recognized the need to support Open Science projects – an occurrence quite rare in Germany and Europe and should be praised. But these are the only positive arguments.

We recommend all organisations that consider applying to DFG for funding to learn from this example and carefully inquire about all questions they might have before investing the time to prepare their proposals. Even then, be prepared for some negative surprises along the way as conditions might be expanded following the submission of a proposal.

Further, we believe the public has the right to know the details of the projects being funded with their money. And if we are talking about Open Science, perhaps it is time to start working towards open review of grant applications as well. It would be the logical next step to take in the transition towards a more open, transparent and fair scientific process.