Grantopedia

Adobe Apologises in advance of Grants.gov release

We’re about 40 minutes into the Grants.gov Stakeholder meeting and one of my questions is being answered by Douglas Prevelidge from Adobe: if Adobe works with 7.0.9, what happens if you have succumbed to the persistent upgrade opportunities from Adobe. I know I have installed Adobe 8.1 and have a lot of trouble dealing with different versions of Adobe reader (and Professional). Doug looked really uncomfortable with a public apology. He said there have been “issues” in testing the new forms with the later versions. Here is the published apology that was unreadable in the broadcast but available in the PowerPoint on Grants.gov. This content does not need any embellishment.

The Grants.gov application, which is based on Adobe LiveCycle, was built and tested with Adobe Reader version 7.0.9 as the client software. Since then, Adobe has released new versions of both the Reader client and Acrobat; version 8.0 was released December 2006 and version 8.1 this past June. Adobe has determined that users of Grants.gov may experience possible issues if they have upgraded to the new versions of the client software.

We currently do not recommend the usage of Reader 8.0 and 8.1 with the Grants.gov application until more thorough testing has been conducted and these issues have been resolved. The Adobe engineering teams are aggressively working on a suitable resolution to this issue. In the meantime, we recommend that end users of the Grants.gov application either refrain from updating beyond Reader version 7.0.9 or re-install Reader version 7.0.9 if they have updated. Reader 7.0.9 can be downloaded from the following web site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2_allversions.html and instructions for installation are included.  For those users that are experiencing problems with Acrobat 8.0 or 8.1 as the client software, they should contact Adobe customer support to receive instruction on how to install and use Reader 7.0.9 alongside their Acrobat software.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause users of the Grants.gov application and we are targeting a permanent resolution in the September/October timeframe.

More comments later, but this is the first interesting tidbit from the presentation.

Sustainable Research Funding Analysis

While we wait for the Grants.gov Adobe day web cast later today, I wanted to point to a couple of compelling articles and analysis about the long term effects of rapid growth in funding, using NIH as the example. The analysis was brought to my attention (thanks emptypockets) here.

It is foolish policy to pour resources into something for five years, and then starve it for five years. You not only waste the potential growth of the second five years, but you waste a good deal of your investment the first five years as well. Much of the funding that was poured into the NIH between 1998 and 2003 will be a loss as those research projects are put in the freezer and those young scientist trainees leave science.

Sure explains a lot of the stress in research institutions in general and research administration specifically.

I was reminded about something that is fundamentally obvious to research administrators, that funding is essentially about a sustainable workforce. And sustainability is measured in decades due to the nature of academic research endeavors.

The original source material for this analysis is available in a Science magazine article.  Significant analytics on the effects of policy funding on research science were delivered in this study by Georgia State University economist Paula Stephan. If you were ever looking for documentation to talk to policymakers, this is it.

We should get Paula to address this issue at some national meetings, specifically the FDP.

Critique of Scientific American Article Attacking Grants.gov

By Bob Beattie

I had a professor who once said that if you want people to believe your argument, it is best to be accurate in the presentation of your facts. It seems to me that almost every statement George Musser makes in this recent SCIAM article is inaccurate. Is George taking a view of writing that if you tell a big enough distortion, people will believe it?

In the article, George asserts that IBM, Adobe Systems and the U.S. federal government have created technology that “retards human progress” by creating Grants.gov. He claims that “no one would have thought that the process of applying for scientific and scholarly grants could be made any more unwieldy and wasteful than it already was,” but that the joint effort of these three has “managed to achieve exactly that.”

I recently wrote a rebuttal you can find here and here is my drift:

I will be the first to say that Grants.gov has growing pains and I have done so at meetings of research administrators, including at FDP. Yet I do not mindlessly attack the process but try to focus on specific, fixable problems that I know about from using the system and talking to others who have done so. The Grants.gov staff and some agency users such as NIH are very responsive to suggestions.

George, on the other hand, makes inaccurate statements one after the other. Has he ever used the system, does he make any positive suggestion, what is his purpose? 

Is there anything useful in George's commentary? I cannot find any truth in it. I have been using Grants.gov for 3 years and I have taught some 60 groups at Michigan on how to use it. Michigan folks have prepared, and our grants office has submitted, some 1000 applications during that three years. We feel Grants.gov is a useful system. It has processed some 100,000 applications in three years so they must be doing something right.

So read my article and tell me what you think.

FFATA details mean changes ahead

Those of you who witnessed the June 19th FFATA webcast hosted at HUD may be interested in what this means for the applicant community. (Sadly this good presentation was marred by the lack of call-in participation due to technical difficulties. You can give your feedback here.)

This is how FFATA works in the simple: the Federal agencies will connect their back office systems to a big public searchable database starting this year. This means that all of the information will be coming from agency systems. Some information, however, will originate with your applications to Grants.gov. Here is a link to what OMB wants to see in this database.

We emailed in our questions during the presentation, which were answered promptly during the meeting:

    To comply with FFATA:

    Will there be changes to the SF-424RR formset? If so, when?

    Will there be changes to the SF-424 formset? If so, when?

The answers were, yes, we don’t know, yes, we don’t know, respectively. For the applicant community this means that the base forms will change. These changes have a wide variety of implications for the System-to-System developer community, as we will need to release changes to the software to accommodate the new forms (what S2Sers would describe as “new XML schema” as for the SF-424RR.)

Finally, there continues to be the ongoing conflicts of schedule between the freeze of forms changes caused by the changeover to Adobe and the mandatory changes to the forms caused by FFATA this year. Not quite a perfect storm…

The Federal budget universe in visual form

Here's an interesting and well-executed poster showing the relative size of the various parts of the Federal government, based on their budgets. Note the pull down menu on the side that allows you to zoom in on a particular agency.

Adobe update: time will tell

The delay of Adobe Day at Grants.gov signaled a larger delay in the deployment of the Adobe Acrobat Forms. This was confirmed during the May FDP, which I attended.

Conversations with a wide variety of sources and a hands-on drive of the Adobe NIH R01 form set indicates several problems. Certainly there were a lot of solvable bugs, which would be anticipated in a pre-alpha release. Others look difficult. The 3 major areas of concern (shared among us). I’ll handle each of these in turn.

Slowness: As it currently stands, Adobe is slow. In testing the application on a fast Macbook Pro and a fast PC with the Acrobat forms navigation window open, it took 55 seconds per form to move from the left window to the right window. Moving between forms takes some more time. Saving the proposal is fairly slow. The in-form calculation and movement within a form are acceptably fast. It is unclear what performance optimizations will be available to the development team given that Adobe is a well developed product at this point.

Form in Forms: Adobe Acrobat does support attaching other adobe PDF documents. Adobe does not allow data within a PDF form to pass through to the data in another PDF form it is attached to. This is a problem for Sub-contract budgets. It also could be an intractable problem.

Adobe is like PureEdge, sorta: While this may not seem like a big deal, there is general agreement that PureEdge is fairly pedestrian in its design (look/feel/interface). The Adobe interface was required by Grants.gov to look and behave (for the most part) exactly like PureEdge. There was an opportunity to make the interface better, but that has probably passed to the technology that will replace Adobe sometime in the future.

Adobe Day to come: Speculation at the FDP was that it would be a while before we would see a re-scheduled Adobe day. The Federal Agencies we talked to said, in essence, that Grants.gov couldn’t get the software to work so they killed the demonstration. Lord knows they have a very complicated system to build. Standby for further information from Grants.gov.