Grantopedia

Universities speak out on science research funding

There's a growing clamor for more federal research funding coming from some of the most powerful and important research institutions in the country, who have created an organization called Broken Pipeline to publicize the problem.
 
Some sobering statistics on the difficulty of securing funding, as reported in Inside Higher Education:

• The overall success rate for the vital NIH R01 (or Research Project) grants, or their equivalents, decreased from 32 percent in 1999 to 24 percent last year.
• The success rate for applications on their first submission dropped from 29 percent in 1999 to 12 percent last year.

Congressional testimony and sponsorship of this call to action was given by representatives from two Cayuse customer institutions, The Ohio State University, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Forms? How about a Web app?

We did a little survey of participants in the RESADM-L listserv, an email discussion list that serves the community of research administrators (RAs) at universities and colleges in the US. (The listserv archives are here.)

Grants.gov will soon be releasing a new set of downloadable forms based on Adobe technology. We wanted to gauge the impact on the RAs who are responsible for preparing and submitting proposals. This is a non-scientific survey, but it supports what we hear anecdotally all the time: that downloadable forms are inherently difficult to work with. The results of the survey are available here in PDF format.

As I've said before, Cayuse customers don't have to worry about downloadable forms nearly as much as institutions that insist on using them exclusively. There is definitely a better way.