17 June 2019, 5pm (Concept Notes) 3 September 2019, 5pm (invited full applications)
Wellcome Trust Open Research Fund
https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/schemes/open-research-fund
Up to £50K is available for up to one year open to individuals or teams of up to six members from anywhere in the world to develop, pilot and evaluate innovative approaches that aim to make health research more open
you must propose to:
- trial new tools, resources or ways of working that enable research outputs to be discovered, accessed and re-used
- evaluate the impact, benefits and risks of your work.
Wellcome particularly welcomes proposals that do one or more of the following:
- incentivise researchers to practise open research, for example by developing new metrics to assess impact, or by improving how good practice is recognised, embedded and rewarded
- transform the way researchers publish, for example by developing open source tools that increase the use of pre-prints, or by testing new ways to support open peer review or to report null or negative findings
- improve how research outputs are made findable, accessible, interoperable, re-usable (FAIR) and reproducible, for example by pioneering approaches to enrich and standardise metadata or to assess the reproducibility of findings
- develop open platforms or tools, for example to combine or repurpose datasets and other research outputs from different locations and disciplines, to crowdsource ideas, or to mine vast quantities of research data and content.
Complete a three-page Concept Note form by 17 June
This is an annual call. In 2018 Wellcome received 96 applications and, as an experiment, 78 of those applications are available with brief summaries explaining why they were successful/unsuccessful – i.e. how well the application fitted the criteria of the call.
These are available here:
https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/open-research-fund-applications-submitted
Anyone planning to make an application to this call would be well advised to study the feedback to these applications so as to decide whether your idea is in remit for the call and how best to address your case (e.g. feasibility, degree of innovation, planned dissemination, community buy-in and evaluation of impact).
The 8 awards are listed here:
https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/people-and-projects/grants-awarded?scheme_id=3580