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Getting a new research grant is hard. You have to write a proposal about things you haven’t even done yet, and convince a panel that your work is important and likely to succeed. And because you haven’t done the work yet (because you need grant money first) you don’t have published articles to support your case. It’s a vicious cycle.

Jason McDermott is trying to break that cycle by publishing his proof-of-concept methodology in F1000Research, and submitting a grant application with a link to his article. In the mean time, peer reviewers have already looked at the article, and their comments are visible to everyone – including the grant reviewers. By the time his application is reviewed, McDermott might also have responded to reviewers, or even uploaded a new version of the article. The DOI link he sent as part of his grant application will provide the grant review panel with the most recent update of the article and the referee comments.

Press release

It’s unusual to publish a research proposal in such a preliminary stage as part of a grant proposal, so we have published a press release today with more information about the article and McDermott’s approach (which you can also read about on his blog). You can download the PDF of the press release from our site.

Multi-drug resistance transporters

So what’s it all about? McDermott’s proposed research is on new computational methods to predict multi-drug resistance transporters in bacteria. He explains the details on his blog and in the comic below, using the analogy of wolves (antibiotics) and deer (bacteria).