W hen Kylie Ball begins a grantwriting workshop, she often alludes to the funding successes and failures that she has experienced in her career. "I say, 'I've attracted more than $25 million in grant funding and have had more than 60 competitive grants funded. But I've also had probably twice as many rejected.' A lot of early-career researchers often find those rejections really tough to take. But I actually think you learn so much from the rejected grants." Grant writing is a job requirement for research scientists who need to fund projects year after year. Most proposals end in rejection, but missteps give researchers a chance to learn how to find other opportunities, write better proposals and navigate the system. Taking time to learn from the setbacks and successes of others can help to increase the chances of securing funds, says Ball, who runs workshops alongside her role as a behavioural scientist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Do your research Competition for grants has never been more intense. The European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme is the European Union's largest-ever research and innovation programme, with nearly €80 billion (US$89 billion) in funding set aside between 2014 and 2020. It reported a 14% success rate for its first 100 calls for proposals, although submissions to some categories had lower success rates. The commission has published its proposal for Horizon Europe, the €100-billion programme that will succeed Horizon 2020. In Australia, since 2017, the National Health and Medical Research Council has been funding less than 20% of proposals it receives. And the US National Science Foundation (NSF) received 49,415 proposals and funded 11,447 of them in 2017-less than 25%. That's tens of thousands of rejections in a single year from the NSF alone.
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