(Apologies for cross-posting)

 

Hello all,

 

I’m glad to announce a series of three open community conversations as part of the IMLS-funded initiative Planning for Open Grants, focused on efforts to more widely share grant proposals to further research transparency and professional development. We welcome perspectives from librarians, archivists, academic researchers, students, and grant administrators.

 

The details are below as well as the project website: https://www.ogrants.org/upcoming_events. These calls will inform our understanding of both social and technical issues involved in open access to proposals; we hope many of you will join us and circulate through your networks!

 

What are we so afraid of?

Thursday, October 26^th, 2pm Eastern

Register

The project advisory committee has surfaced a variety of potential concerns with grant sharing, including fear of “scooping”; anxiety over unfulfilled project goals, risk of sharing financial information, and potential for targeting by bad actors seeking out research on supposedly objectionable topics. This call will review and prioritize the most pressing fears and concerns and develop a strategy or talking points for addressing each one.

 

Describing and discovering proposals

Thursday, November 2^nd, 11am Eastern

Register

Which descriptive metadata elements are most valuable in finding and understanding grant proposals? How do these complement or enrich basic metadata already available from funders? These questions are critical to moving forward with sharing proposals, whether through a standalone repository or incorporated into other existing repositories. This session will offer an opportunity to discuss the metadata scheme drafted by the project team, and to consider ways to improve or refine these recommendations.

 

Contributing to the scholarly record

Thursday, November 30^th, 1pm Eastern

Register

Much like other “gray literature” (e.g., newsletters, reports), grant proposals are seldom recognized as research objects in and of themselves. This session will consider how researchers and collaborators should get credit for the labor of writing proposals by compiling concrete ways to make this a reality, beyond circulating the proposals online. How would integrations with other repositories or frameworks such as ORCID promote this? Which metadata--about a grant’s project team, references or citations, quality ratings, etc.--could potentially demonstrate the value of a particular proposal, and which may be infeasible or undesirable?

 

Please feel free to reach out to me directly with any questions. To encourage open conversation, the calls will not be recorded.

 

Best,

Perry

 

 

Perry Collins

Interim Chair, Digital Partnerships & Strategies

Editor-in-Chief, LibraryPress@UF

George A. Smathers Libraries

University of Florida

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