CZI grantees

Topics on this page:

• What to expect as a grantee
  • Communicating with CZI as a grantee
  • Expectations for open science practices
  • Other expectations
• Services available to CZI grantees

This page describes what grantees can expect while conducting CZI-supported research, including obligations to engage in open science practices as well as resources available to support these efforts.

The following pages consolidate information for grantees in specific programs:

• Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS)
• Rare as One (RAO)

What to expect as a grantee

Communicating with CZI as a grantee

Please refer to our Community Participation Guidelines to view expectations for ensuring everyone feels welcomed, respected, and supported in our community.

CZI Science shares public information about our current and emerging projects on Medium and Twitter (at @cziscience); CZI-wide announcements are featured at a separate Twitter account, @czi.

Program-specific communications Most of your interactions with CZI will occur via the Program funding your research. Watch for emails from your Program with information about the following:

• communication mechanisms, like newsletters and discussion forums (e.g., Slack)
• events, like webinars and workshops
• convenings with other grantees from your programs (generally organized and hosted by the CZI Science Meetings team)

These opportunities are open to project leads and often other members of their core teams, so you can leverage the experience and knowledge from the researcher community working on projects similar to your own.

Grant operations: Contact sciencegrants@chanzuckerberg.com for information on no cost extensions and answers to other questions about administering your grant. Complete information on award policies can be found in our standard institutional sign-off form; please see the version shared with your award letter for specific details related to your grant.

Expectations for open science practices

The following descriptions highlight general expectations for your CZI-supported work. Please check your grant agreement for information customized to your grant program or RFA.

• Protocols and reagents are shared to support reproducibility and robustness of laboratory procedures. Share experimental methods through protocols.io, and (where possible) associate them with a relevant CZI community, like the Human Cell Atlas or Neurodegeneration Method Development Community. Submit reagents and other resources, such as transgenic organisms, cell lines, and monoclonal antibodies, to existing community repositories like Addgene.
• Software and code are publicly available to allow other researchers to reproduce and build upon existing methods. Develop code openly and collaboratively through sites like GitHub, and release under maximally permissive open-source licenses.
• Data are shared to support data aggregation and reuse. Publish data using a platform like Data Dryad or the Cellxgene Data Portal that allows both open, free dissemination and long-term, sustainable archival as best suits the nature of the data involved. When applicable, share both raw and processed data, always document with metadata substantive enough to maximize data reusability and format data according to best practices or commonly accepted schema.
• Publications are disseminated as widely and rapidly as possible. Submit manuscripts to a preprint server like bioRxiv or medRxiv before or upon first submission to a journal. Open access publication is encouraged, and grant funds can be used to pay for open access fees.

You are welcome to contact openscience@chanzuckerberg.com for more information on these and other open science topics!

Other expectations

Acknowledge CZI as a source of funding in all research deliverables using the following language: “This project has been made possible in part by grant number «GrantNumber» from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.”

Ethics: CZI holds ourselves and our scientific partners to the highest ethical standards. Our ethics policies cover all business practices in which CZI engages, including encouraging respectful treatment of all persons without discrimination, open and honest communication, and assurance of no retaliation for reporting incidents. These policies also extend to cover specific issues related to scientific research: responsible use of grant funding, attribution of credit, and other areas of scientific (mis)conduct. Finally, we require compliance with institutional and national standards for non-human animal research and human subjects research, including supporting data privacy and security to meet national and international standards.

Services available to CZI grantees

Services specifically related to open science that are open to CZI-supported projects include:

Open science office hours: Have questions about open science approaches? Staff are available to assist CZI grantees in adopting or implementing open science practices, including sharing of all research deliverables: protocols, software/code, data, and preprints/publications. Please schedule a time to meet with a member of the CZI Open Science team to discuss your topics of interest. Examples of questions other grantees have asked in office hours include:

• I’m a biomedical researcher. How and when do I talk to my collaborators about the open science approaches we’ll use for our project?
• I’m a researcher moving into imaging experiments. How do I manage imaging data during a project, and share/publish the data when I’m ready?
• I help lead a scientific open source software project. How can I develop the community surrounding my project, and manage it sustainably?
• I run a patient advocacy group for a rare disease. How can I communicate and enforce expectations about data sharing and other open science practices among my collaborators and grantees?

Data publishing: Not sure where or how to publish or share your data with the rest of the scientific community? Data Dryad is a repository for sharing research data of any structure and type. As CZI is a Dryad member, CZI grantees are eligible to waive the fee for publishing data through Dryad by selecting CZI as a funding source when submitting data. Learn more on the Publishing data with Dryad topic page.

Movement and Capacity Building: CZI’s Movement and Capacity Building team offers training sessions for grantees from across our initiatives in areas related to organizational and professional development:

• strategic planning
• communication
• workplace culture

Learn more on their Training Sessions page.