Don't Take It Personally Posted on October 19, 2007 Robert C. Malenka (bio) offers advice on the grants-submission process.

There’s nothing wrong with taking the same grant, in my view at least, and sending it to many different funding agencies. You have to know what’s legal and what’s illegal. You can’t take the exact same grant for NIH and call it a different name and send them both to NIH, but you can write an NIH grant with a very well thought out set of specific aims and then just reformat it and send it to private foundations that support research in that area and to any other kind of agency that might support it.

If you can find more senior investigators and more senior people with a lot of experience to read over your grant, that’s fantastic. Just be aware, you’re asking a big favor as somebody who is senior and gets asked for that. It’s quite a bit of work to read over a 20-page single-spaced grant. So don’t take it personally if somebody says no to you, “I don’t have the time.”

But it’s, again, this is kind of common sense. Before you let a study section or review panel see it, you want as many people to look at it and critique it as you can, including some of your own colleagues at your own level who might not be that experienced but still might be useful if they can read it through and say, “You know, it really wasn’t clear what you – the experiments you were describing here.” That’s very useful because if they can’t understand it then a review panel can’t understand it.

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