1. Expedited Process Available for F&A Reduction Requests on Small Sponsored Projects
Effective immediately, the signature of a Dean (or Dean’s designee) on a Proposal Routing Form will constitute approval for any reductions in F&A that may be included in a proposal with direct costs of $50,000 per year or less. This means F&A waiver request forms no longer need to be completed for these types of projects. If any single year of a project is valued at more than $50,000, the regular F&A waiver request form should still be completed.
This change is being implemented to reduce the administrative burden on principal investigators and their departments, but is not intended to convey any fundamental change about which projects should receive a waiver. Please request full indirect costs* on all sponsored projects, absent unusual and compelling circumstances warranting an exception. Unit heads and deans or their designees will continue to make the determination, following a request and dialogue with their investigators, about whether or not a specific project warrants a reduced rate.
Additional process improvements in this area (including a new and improved F&A waiver request form and a list of non-profit sponsors with pre-approved rates) are currently being finalized and will be released in the near future.
*Indirect cost rates and pre-approved exceptions for various types of projects can be found at: http://www.policy.umn.edu/groups/ppd/documents/rates/f_and_a_rates.cfm
2. December 3 Deadline for NIH Loan Repayment Applications
BENEFITS: New extramural Loan Repayment Program (LRP) contracts for Clinical Research, Pediatric Research, Health Disparities Research, Contraception and Infertility Research, and Clinical Research for Individuals from Disadvantaged Backgrounds are awarded for two-year periods and repay up to $35,000 of qualified educational debt annually. An NIH grant or other NIH funding is not required to apply for or participate in the LRPs.
ELIGIBILITY: Applicants must possess a doctoral-level degree (except for the Contraception and Infertility Research LRP); be a U.S. citizen, national, or permanent resident; devote 20 hours or more per week to conducting qualified research funded by a university, domestic nonprofit organization, or federal, state, or local government entity; and have qualified educational loan debt equal to or exceeding 20 percent of their institutional base salary.
QUESTIONS? Visit the LRP website at http://www.lrp.nih.gov for more information and to access the online application. For additional assistance, call or e-mail the LRP Information Center at (866) 849-4047 or lrp@nih.gov.
3. Time to file end-of-year REPA forms
The 2007-2008 REPA (Report of External Professional Activities) filing period has begun. Qualifying individuals must complete an end-of-year REPA form to report their external professional activities and interests for the 2007-2008 reporting period (August 26, 2007-August 25, 2008), even if they have no activities or interests to report.
The deadline for completing the 2007-2008 REPA form is November 7, 2008. To prepare a REPA form, go to http://egms.umn.edu/REPA/.
Contact repa@egms.umn.edu with questions about REPA filing.
4. Grants.gov switching from Bulk Mail info system to RSS
Grants.gov announced in their Fall, 2008 Newsletter the switch to RSS as their vehicle to communicate news and grant opportunity listings and modifications. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is an easy way for you to be alerted when content that interests you appears on Grants.gov. Instead of visiting the Grants.gov web site to browse for new articles and features, RSS automatically tells you when something new are posted online.
More information about this feature can be found at: http://grants.gov/help/rss.jsp.
5.
Streamlining Bureaucracy: The Hennepin County/U of M Cooperative Agreement
Hennepin County and the U of M have successfully streamlined the contracting process by implementing an overarching master cooperative agreement and an easy way for projects to be funded under its pre-approved terms.
The agreement saves University and County staff weeks or months of work by eliminating the need to renegotiate contract terms for every collaborative project. Rather, work is outlined and approved with a simple “Work Order.” The Work Order template is accessible online, along with clear instructions on how to prepare the paperwork.
For more information about the agreement or the Hennepin-University Partnership, please visit their website or contact Kathie Doty, Hennepin-University Liaison, at 612.625.4383 or kdoty@umn.edu.
6.
Increased Monitoring of Compliance with NIH Public Access Policy
Beginning this month, PIs will receive emails from their NIH Program Officers if papers included in proposals, applications, or progress reports appear to fall under the policy but their citations do not include PubMed Central reference numbers (PMCID), NIH Manuscript Submission reference numbers, or an indication that the publishing journal submits articles directly to PMC on behalf of their authors ("PMC Journal - in Process").
PIs who receive these e-mails must respond both to NIH and their SPA Grants Administrator with the appropriate citation numbers for each publication, or must include an explanation for why the paper did not need to comply with the policy (e.g., accepted for publication prior to April 7, 2008 or not peer-reviewed.)
NIH issued instructions for the explicit location of such citations in NIH proposals, applications, or progress reports. PIs are also encouraged to review progress reports submitted by their subrecipients to make sure any subaward-funded publications include appropriate citations.
For more information, visit the NIH Guide Notice at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-119.html.
7.
Funding Opportunities and Program Announcements
- Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment (IREE), a signature program of the Institute on the Environment, is an extremely successful program aiming to promote environmentally sound solutions to the dual challenges of energy security and economic development in the region and the world. IREE supports a wide range of research related to energy systems and the environment, and recently issued a call for proposals. See the IREE funding page for more information.
- Institute on the Environment (IonE) With the Discovery Grants program, IonE aims to launch a handful of highly innovative, world-class research activities with a one-time investment of "venture capital" funding.
For details, visit http://www.environment.umn.edu/research/discoverygrants08.html
Initial concept papers are due: December 5, 2008
- Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research (ONR) The ONR is seeking proposals that address basic science and engineering research in the science of autonomy. The research topics of interest are: (1) Human Collaboration and Interaction with Unmanned Systems, (2) Autonomous perception and intelligent decision making, (3) Scalable and robust distributed collaboration, and (4) Intelligent Architecture Enablers. For details, visit http://www.onr.navy.mil/02/BAA/docs/09-008.pdf
White papers due: November 21, 2008
Full Proposals are due: January 23, 2009
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