The Journal of Trial & Error wants to further our aim of examining trial and error by also looking at rejection at the stage of grant applications. We believe that applications often suffer from a highly competitive system rather than a deficient proposal. We wrote a blog post on this topic, “The far-side of scientific funding: why you should publish your rejected grant applications”.
Our three main reasons for publishing (parts of) rejected grant applications are:
Grant applications are valuable in and of themselves. Proposals are overviews of the state of the field in which the author(s) has/have identified a gap in knowledge.
Grant applications are valuable to understand the past. They can be used as data to study the history of trends and biases in the process of awarding grants.
Grant applications are valuable to shape the future of science. They can form a metadata collection that will keep us from losing valuable avenues of research by safekeeping ideas.
We see the first stage of this project as a dialogue with the authors. We are, therefore, very welcoming of remarks, suggestions, and questions. Please send these to us by email at [email protected].