PIs can have students assist with grant applications, but do they ever hire outside help?
I have heard of freelance grantwriters who work for non-profits outside of academia, does this ever happen inside academia? Do any types of universities or departments do this more often than others?
My interest is in biology research, but answers that extend into other fields may be helpful for other people who come across this question.
The research company where I work is organized much like a soft-money university, in that we are largely organized around PIs who fund themselves and the others working on their research by writing proposals to external funding agencies.
One of the ways in which things are different, however, is that the PIs have a lot of help to draw on in writing proposals. It's not "freelancers," because we're generally drawing on others at the company, but it's still help from outside the research group and can be extremely valuable. In particular:
These sorts of things can help a lot in producing a nice proposal, and I wish my university collaborators did this sort of thing more often themselves. When collaborating, we often offer to organize the review stages, for example, because they really help; many university PIs, however, do "last minute" scheduling that makes it difficult to use these processes.
There is nothing to prevent a university researcher from using these sorts of resources, whether internal or external---at many universities, for example, there is a Writing Center that would likely be quite happy to help with copy-editing and the non-technical aspects of review. Likewise, I have known professors who would review one another's proposals before they sent them out, in a less formal version of our review process.
It just takes some organization and pre-planning to do these sorts of things... and for many of us, that is lacking without an external framework that helps to chivvy us towards remembering.
