Grantopedia

Cayuse Users Group Meeting Aug. 1 - 2

We're looking forward to hosting over 50 customers at our Users Group meeting here in Portland next week. The event kicks off with Sunday evening dinner, and the meeting starts Monday morning. We wrap up on Tuesday.

Science Funding in 2012 Budget Request

Against the backdrop of Washington DC politics and budget wrangling, it's useful to see where science and research spending fits. The graphic here at Live Science shows that science agencies combine for about 2% of the total budget, with details on the funding levels over the past three fiscal years.

The Origins of the NIH

The Scientist has an article and photo from the NIH archives describing the earliest days of the NIH. When it was originally known as "the Laboratory of Hygiene" in 1887, it was staffed by a single scientist.

Grants to Oregon Theater Companies for Shakespeare

The National Endowment for the Arts announced its "Shakespeare for New Generation" grants. Two of the grants went to Oregon companies: The Ashland Shakespeare Festival and Portland Center Stage.

Each of the 36 participating companies will present productions of Shakespeare plays with accompanying educational activities to at least 10 schools.  Activities may also include in-school residencies, workshops, or post-performance discussions.

Off-the-shelf or DIY?

Electronic research administration strategies often become mired in the "features wish list" syndrome. In this scenario, large complex system development projects attempt to satisfy every requirement on insanely long lists. The resulting project is invariably expensive, requiring additions of staff, years of development, and an open-ended commitment to maintenance. Sadly, many of these projects fail to deliver even a portion of the original "wish list," despite the effort and expense.

This phenomenon is well known in both higher education and government IT, as illustrated in this artlcle on Veterans Administration CIO Roger Baker in Federal Computer Week.

Baker recalled one incident when he found a commercial package that could meet 80 percent of the stated requirements for a project, but the manager in charge insisted the solution must meet all the requirements.

"I said, well that was your requirement last time and you got zero percent of your requirements over the past 10 years," Baker said. "Would you rather have zero percent or 80 percent?"

The Cayuse approach has been so successful because we focus on a tight set of requirements that are standard across the research industry. We deliver an out-of-the-box solution that satisfies 80 - 90% of common pre-award requirements. We deploy the solution within 6 - 8 weeks. Customers of Cayuse 424 love the system.

Devising a strategy for electronic research success requires making trade-offs between "need to have" and "want to have."

NIH and NRSA funding levels

NIH announced at the Federal Demonstration Partnership meeting last month that overall appropriations for the balance of the fiscal year are set at $30.9 B, a 1% decrease relative to last year's funding. However, the National Research Service Awards (NRSA) program recieved a 2% increase in funding.

Two other notes from the NIH regarding research grant applications:

• The Personal Statement in teh Biosketch can now be used to explain a hiatus or reduced productivity.
• No Cost Extensions (NCEs) can now be requested for 1 to 12 months, previously it was only 6, 9, or 12 months.

Updated NIH Kirschstein-NRSA Rates

NIH has published the updated stipend levels and rates for training and fellowships in FY 2011.  These rates are used in creating budgets for F and T grant opportunities with deadlines after 4/25/2011. Cayuse customers prepare and submit these opportunities electronically in Cayuse 424, and the rate tables are stored in the system. That makes it easy to create accurate budgets for proposals.

Sponsored Research Steps

The Binghamton University Magazine featured an excellent overview of the sponsored research process. Their "Anatomy of a Grant" article follows an example from their campus. Concise and informative. Targeted to audiences who don't know about the administrative side of research.

(Author's note: as a Binghamton U alumni, the hard copy magazine showed up in my mailbox.)

Budget calculations on sponsored research

In a post on the SRA Catalyst newsletter, author Michael DeShazo provides a very clear tutorial on how to use Excel to determine F&A costs when you only know the total project budget and exempt expenses. He also created a very nice video showing how to build the formulas in Excel.

Similar calculations are done automatically in the budget development tools in Cayuse 424. In addition to determining total direct and indirect costs based on institutional F&A rates, Cayuse 424 will validate the budget form against published agency rules and other submission guidelines. Building accurate budgets for federal sponsors is fast and easy in Cayuse 424. You won't be surprised to know that we demo this regularly.

Update on grant proposal submissions and operations during shut-down

The best information we have as of today is that Grants.gov will continue to operate normally during a federal government shut-down. The site is hosted and staffed by a government contractor at a third party location. These operations are fully funded, so all indications point to grant applications being processed normally by the Grants.gov servers.

Most of the main sponsoring agencies, like the NIH, have systems which automatically retrieve grant proposals from Grants.gov. As long as Grants.gov is accepting applications and as long as the automated agency systems are retrieving them, proposals will be submitted normally.

However, anything that requires human interaction would be subject to delay. Technical issues with a submission, for example, that would normally route through a help desk escalation process would not be likely to receive attention during a shut-down, owing to staff and contractor furloughs. This good news for Cayuse sites, since errors or problems on proposals are quite rare.

The official guidelines from the White House to the federal agencies are posted here (PDF). The only services and web sites that would continue operating are "excepted activities," meaning those that deal with public safety.

This article from Federal Computing Weekly offers reporting on questions surrounding other types of government web sites.