In most countries, science depends heavily on public funding. Hence, researchers in most countries spend significant amounts of their time submitting detailed proposals to government agencies explaining what they aim to study, why it matters and how much funding they require. Many scientists also spend significant amounts of their time assessing others’ proposals as reviewers and funding panel members.

All this is important. We all want the best proposals to be funded, and this necessarily involves a laborious process in which, in line with the Haldane principle, governments establish their funding priorities and allocate budgets, while scientists set out how they will address those priorities and their expert colleagues rank their proposals.

Despite our best efforts, these mechanisms are still not perfect. But the much bigger issue is that there is simply not enough government money to fund all proposals that are deemed sound enough to fund. Up to half of the proposals they receive are considered fundable by funding panels in many Western countries, but the proportion that are actually funded is three to five times as low. As a result, vast numbers of potentially sound proposals, most of which took their authors 100 to 300 hours of painstaking work, are not funded.

Luckily, governments aren’t the only sources of science funding. Charities, industry and private philanthropists also contribute to the science funding pool. In the UK and the US, for example, federal governments fund only 50 to 60 per cent of academic research. The UK’s Association of Medical Research Charities – which brings together 150 funders, including the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust – contributed of UK health research spending in 2022.

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Many proposals submitted for public funding can also be (and are eventually) funded by these alternative sources, and governments themselves typically encourage researchers to diversify their funding portfolios. Yet, in practice, rerouting proposals creates considerable overhead for both applicants and funders. Researchers must rework their applications to fit the funders’ different formats and highlight how their proposals fit the specific funder’s strategic priorities (which often requires reframing their importance and potential impact, while keeping the core project largely unchanged).

Meanwhile, funders must repeat the review process already performed elsewhere, assembling new expert panels and recruiting external peer reviewers to judge the technical soundness of the research plans. For major charities and industry funders, this may not be a big deal. However, for smaller entities, it can be a significant burden, which may hinder their ability and willingness to fund academic research – or it may induce them to cut corners, making their funding decisions less robust.

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To address this issue, governments must recognise both the limitations of their academic research budgets and the value of the rigorous systems they have built for evaluating research grant proposals. Instead of discarding robustly evaluated, fundable but unfunded proposals and sending their authors back to square one in their search for funding, government agencies could make it part of their mission to help these proposals find their funding “homes”.

A logical step in this direction would be the creation of “grant commons”: up-to-date repositories of expertly evaluated proposals. Vetted funders would be invited to select projects from these “marketplaces” that they were potentially willing to support.

Of course, this would not prevent each funder having its own funding preferences. Moreover, it is possible that for the final evaluation, each funder would still require tailored material and additional context to highlight the relevance of the proposal to its own stakeholders. Crucially, however, this system will avoid duplication in the peer reviewing of the core science and allow a universally acceptable format for proposal submission.

A similar system for life science research papers, “”, has already been put in place, providing a single peer review process – streamlining resubmission if a paper is rejected – to nearly 30 journals across multiple publishers, including high-impact venues, such as Genome Biology, PLoS Biology, EMBO Journal and Genes and Development.

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Cell Press, the publisher of top-tier life science journals such as Cell, Neuron and Current Biology, has also introduced its own system of parallel “multi-journal” submissions, with a single peer review followed by evaluation at multiple editorially independent journals. And many publishers, such as Cell Press, Springer Nature and AAAS (the publisher of Science), now allow the transfer of manuscripts peer-reviewed at their flagship journals to lower-impact supplements, along with their peer reviews and without altering the formatting.

Extending the “commons” idea to grant proposals would have its own challenges, however, and the exact details of how it should work still need to be worked out, probably through trial and error. For instance, should governments or other funders have “first dibs” on the proposal pool? Neither would want to feel they were funding leftovers.

Ideally, the selection process would be collaborative, with all parties working together to maximise the number of funded proposals. In practice, however, this could prove too complex logistically, which is why another idea (often discussed but rarely implemented) could help: funding lotteries. If governments select support for fundable proposals with some degree of randomness, other funders might feel less like they were picking up the scraps.

There are other potential challenges, such as ensuring the security of the repository and properly vetting its users. Still, given the persistent scarcity of government funding and the enormous time and effort researchers spend writing proposals (often, ironically, at the government’s expense), I believe this idea is well worth a shot.

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Instead of letting robustly reviewed, fundable but unfunded proposals go to waste, government funders could turn them into opportunities to make research funding more efficient, equitable and productive.

is head of the Functional Gene Control Research Group at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences, London.

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