A few months ago I submitted a project on open-science for the so-called OSCARS Open Call. Today I received a three-sentence evaluation. The first sentence of the feedback started as follows: “The idea is brilliant and relevant” (and from there it did not go downhill much). Scores on the various dimensions deemed “brilliant and relevant” were 2, 2, 2, 1.5, and 2…on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is the worst score! With such low grades, this brilliant and relevant idea was obviously not selected for funding (were the evaluators confused about the scale?!). I generally don’t post about successes and failures in the Circus Maximus of the funding races (it can easily come across as either boasting or venting), but I thought this one was mildly amusing. If you have to be rejected, I think I prefer the proposal being called “brilliant and relevant” rather than “uninspired and irrelevant”. And of course, if you are just starting out in academia and you get a grant rejected, remember that everybody gets grants rejected, particularly those researchers that seem to hit the funding jackpot again and again. This is a good example of survivorship bias — you only see the successes and not the failures 🙂 Finally, a determinist would argue that this proposal was destined to be rejected; as time progresses we only learn about that which was inevitable from the start (see this blogpost).

Figure shows the first try of ChatGPT when asked “Can you draw a picture of a broken Oscar award?”