Favoring grant applications that promise OA

Jonathan Eisen, A call for Open Access supporters to favor grant proposals from researchers promising Open Access publishing, Tree of Life, November 21, 2006.  Excerpt:

In the world of scientific research, perhaps the most critical step is the acquisition of funding to do research. A key component of grant reviews these days are "Release Policies" for data, tools and research materials. In general, the more "Open" one is with these release policies, the more likely one is to get a grant. This of course makes great sense. If one is going to keep ones data or tools or material private for as long as possible, then one is not advancing science as rapidly as someone else who did the same work but also released everything rapidly.

I believe now is the time for the same thing to be done regarding Open Acces publishing. One can use the same litmus test here. Imagine two grant proposals, to do identical work. And furthermore, assume the researchers will succeed in their work. And one researcher promised to publish in an Open Access manner while the other promises to publish in a non Open manner. Again, assuming everything else is equal, I think the proposal promising Open Access publishing HAS to be scored higher than the one promising non Open publishing....

So I call on researchers who support Open Access publishing in any way to start to bring this up on grant panels and in grant reviews. And to score proposals accordingly....

Comment.  While many funding agencies encourage or require open access to the results of the research they fund, I only know of one that explicitly favors applications that promise open access over applications that don't:  the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).   For details, see my short article on it from October 2006.  It's a great idea, and Jonathan is right that individual friends of OA can implement a bottom-up version of the same policy whenever they serve on a panel reviewing grant proposals.  Spread the word.