If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That motto has spurred many researchers to challenge the rejection of their grant applications. And although the chance of a successful appeal is slim, recent developments should give hope to those turned down by various funding agencies.

Stem cell researchers in California had some recent success in getting those who hold the purse strings to take a second look. On 26 July, the governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state taxpayer-funded stem cell agency based in San Francisco, signed off on its latest funding round of $151 million in research grants to eight investigators. Notably, two of those researchers—Judith Shizuru of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Clive Svendsen of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles—had failed initial rounds of grant review. Both of them took advantage of a unique kind of appeal channel offered by CIRM known as an “extraordinary petition,” which allows for applicants to submit a letter to the agency's independent governing board, the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee, a group of 27 researchers, patient advocates and industry representatives.

It's clear that researchers are willing to fight for their application to make it through. The Brussels-based European Research Council received 234 requests for a second look at proposals in 2011—3.6% of the total number submitted that year. If the researcher's complaint has sufficient evidence to back it up, the council's redress committee can recommend a total reevaluation of the proposal. “Full reevaluations of proposals are rare, and so far there have been two successful redress requests,” a spokesperson told Nature Medicine via email. “In both cases, the reevaluation ended with the researchers being selected for granting.”

Similar figures from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are harder to come by, and the agency does not have firm numbers on how long a given appeal might take. “It is difficult to estimate an average for the amount of time and resources devoted to the appeals process since each request is distinct and the time involved in addressing an appeal varies on a case-by-case basis,” a spokesperson for the NIH Office of Extramural Research said in an email to Nature Medicine. But NIH data do show that the competition for grants is fierce: its 27 centers and institutions received almost 50,000 applications for research project grants, but only 18% received awards, the lowest success rate in recent memory and a far cry from 1999 to 2001, when the success rate held at 32% for three straight years.

Nearly 600 miles north of the NIH's headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in Ottawa is working to reform its grant awards process. Currently, researchers have the option of writing letters if they're unhappy with their initial peer review score, and they can also go through a reapplication process. But the Canadian agency has no formal appeals process like its southern cousin's.

The CIHR has discussed the possibility of implementing one as it works on reforming its grant awarding process this year, according to chief scientific officer Jane Aubin. However, the CIHR probably doesn't have the kind of resources and structure to support a formal appeals process on the same level as the NIH's. “We don't have the equivalent of the Center for Scientific Review,” says Aubin, referring to the body that organizes peer review for NIH grant applications.

Private institutions seem to offer even fewer prescribed avenues for researchers to ask for their applications to be given another once-over. The UK's Wellcome Trust, for example, has no formal appeals process, though applicants can submit revised versions of an application for reconsideration.

Ultimately, many people bemoan that the granting process, including secondary review, takes place behind closed doors. But at a hearing this past April in Washington, DC held by the Institute of Medicine, an independent, nongovernmental organization, John Simpson of the Santa Monica, California–based advocacy group Consumer Watchdog testified that researchers who were denied grants by CIRM were reluctant to come out and publicly criticize the agency's peer review and awarding process. “Who wants to bite the hand that you hope will feed you?” Simpson rhetorically asked.