GRAIL

The Grant Reuse and Abandoned Ideas Library

Country:

Netherlands

The Grant Reuse and Abandoned Ideas Library (GRAIL) Preparatory Project will develop the governance, metadata, and community‑validation/foundation required for GRAIL to become a future EOSC Node. GRAIL addresses a structural gap in the Open Science landscape: the absence ofinfrastructure for preserving and reusing unexecuted research ideas, including rejected grant proposals, abandoned manuscripts, and “retirementreflection” documents. As recognized in our OSCARS evaluation (99/100), GRAIL represents “a rarely acknowledged yet fundamentally importantdimension of Open Science” by extending openness into the ideation phase and creating a new category of reusable scientific object.

During the six‑month Gravity project, we will produce all required preparatory outputs: the Project Plan (M1), the Project Charter and showcasepresentation (M4), and the EOSC Academy training matrix and use‑case report (M6). These will be developed through monthly Charter Workshops, structured interviews with researchers, and consultation with SSHOC, CESSDA, CLARIN, and EOSC technical liaison points to ensure full alignment with federation expectations and interoperability standards.

By formalizing legal, metadata, governance, and training structures, the project will deliver a community‑endorsed blueprint for a sustainable, horizontal EOSC Node. The resulting Charter will position GRAIL to enhance transparency, reduce research waste, and support cross‑disciplinary discovery and training across Europe.

Excellence

This preparatory project delivers the full documentation, governance model, interoperability mapping, and community validation required for GRAIL to become a future EOSC Node. While the broader GRAIL vision involves creating a structured, reusable format for unrealised research, including rejected grant applications, abandoned manuscripts, and long-term “retirement reflection” white papers, this six-month project focuses exclusively on the preparatory work needed for formal Node enrolment. Key deliverables are the Project Plan (M1), the Project Charter (M4), and the EOSC Academy matrix and use-case report (M6), as defined by the Gravity call.

GRAIL addresses a problem recognised in its highly rated OSCARS submission (scored 99/100): the absence of infrastructure for preserving and reusing unexecuted research ideas. OSCARS reviewers described the concept as “unique,” “brilliant in its vision,” and filling a critical gap in the Open Science ecosystem. This project builds on that foundation, refining and formalising the conceptual framework into EOSC-compliant structures ready for implementation in a subsequent phase.

Three objectives drive the work. The first is to develop a governance and legal framework that enables researchers to safely deposit sensitive, unpublished materials including rejected proposals. The second is to align the GRAIL metadata schema with EOSC standards through a detailed crosswalk developed in consultation with SSHOC, CESSDA, CLARIN, and EOSC technical liaison points. The third is to validate community expectations and requirements through semi-structured interviews, ensuring the Charter reflects real researcher needs and institutional constraints.

Together, these activities will culminate in a comprehensive, community-endorsed Project Charter defining GRAIL’s mission, governance, metadata structures, training contributions, and interoperability commitments: a fully specified, EOSC-aligned blueprint for a future GRAIL Node.

Impact

This preparatory project directly supports the objectives of the EOSC Federation and broader EU policy priorities on open science, transparency, research integrity, and more effective use of public research funding. GRAIL contributes to these aims by formalising unexecuted research ideas as a new category of intellectual product, one that represents substantial intellectual labour yet remains structurally absent from current open science infrastructures. As OSCARS evaluators noted, the concept addresses “a rarely acknowledged yet fundamentally important dimension of Open Science,” underscoring the strong alignment between GRAIL’s mission and the EU’s commitment to openness across the entire research lifecycle.

The project enhances FAIRness by making previously invisible research materials findable, accessible, and interoperable. Structured metadata mapped to EOSC-aligned standards ensures that abandoned proposals, unpublished manuscripts, and future “retirement reflection” white papers can be indexed, harvested, and reused across domains. By increasing transparency around why proposals are rejected and how research ideas evolve, GRAIL also contributes to EU efforts to strengthen research integrity and reduce duplication, goals echoed in Horizon Europe’s emphasis on efficiency and responsible research practices.

GRAIL’s relevance extends across research infrastructures and science clusters. OSCARS reviewers noted its clear alignment with existing cluster work programmes and its potential to support cross-domain reuse for infrastructures such as CESSDA, CLARIN, and EOSC-Life. The GRAIL Node will complement these infrastructures by capturing early-stage intellectual contributions that are currently lost, enriching the ecosystem with contextual information that supports interdisciplinary discovery, training, and collaboration.

By delivering the governance model, metadata mapping, and community-validated Charter required for Node readiness, this project positions GRAIL to become a horizontal EOSC Node that strengthens Europe’s open science architecture and contributes directly to ERA priorities of openness, efficiency, and cross-border knowledge sharing.

Sustainabilit

The long-term scalability and sustainability of the GRAIL Node rest on its modular design, low operational footprint, and the Center for Trial and Error’s established experience sustaining open science activities through publication-related revenue and institutional grants from Utrecht University. These existing funding streams provide a stable baseline for maintaining core Node functions beyond the Gravity project period. Additional sustainability pathways will be explored during the preparatory phase, including support agreements with universities whose researchers make significant use of GRAIL, ensuring predictable operational resources while preserving openness and equitable access.

Scalability is enabled by GRAIL’s metadata-driven framework, which accommodates progressive expansion into new object types and disciplinary domains. While the initial focus is on rejected grant proposals, the Node is designed to incorporate abandoned manuscripts and “retirement reflection” white papers in a later phase. These novel research objects, highlighted during the OSCARS evaluation as innovative extensions of the open science paradigm, offer distinctive long-term value: abandoned manuscripts can support training, publication literacy, and method comparison, while retirement reflections preserve conceptual work that is typically lost when researchers leave the field.

Sustainability is further strengthened by GRAIL’s role as a horizontal infrastructure. As OSCARS reviewers noted, the Node demonstrates clear potential for cross-domain reuse and benefit to the “long tail” of science across disciplines, institutions, and research career stages, increasing the likelihood of diversified stakeholder engagement and future resource partners.

Finally, platform sustainability will be supported through the selection of an open-compatible, metadata-exposing repository environment during the preparatory phase. Rather than committing to a specific provider upfront, the project will evaluate systems meeting EOSC interoperability requirements, ensuring the GRAIL Node remains maintainable, adaptable, and aligned with evolving federation standards.