Author: Roger Wood

I wrote recently about hoteling, the concept of having fewer desks than staff reflecting the reality that not all staff are in the office all the time and being space efficient. Most research administration offices are not filled with consultants who spend their days traveling, so hoteling may seem largely irrelevant in our field. However, telework opens up the possibility for many staff, including roles common in research administration, to not be in the office every day. The key benefits of telework include attracting and retaining qualified workers and helping employees perform at their best. However, telework programs – whether for one person or a large staff – require careful planning and commitment from all involved.

The US Government provides some good (and free!) resources for managers, program coordinators and staff to recognize the benefits of teleworking and to design and manage telework programs. These resources are available at telework.gov. For example, an online learning program for managers covers the essentials of telework, and the skills and processes involved. This course is available in SCORM format for download and inclusion in local learning management system if desired. The focus of this program, however, is on the US federal government telework program, which is mandated by Telework Enhancement Act of 2010.

The folks at Grants.gov recently posted a nice summary of the steps involved in getting registered to submit applications via their system. I’ve copied that post below:

In order to apply for a Federal grant, you will need to take a number of steps to register in order to successfully submit your grant application on time.

Everyone has probably heard of the concept of hoteling. Most likely, you’ve heard about it in the context of consulting firms, many of who’s staff are on the road predominantly. Hoteling provide a way to be more space efficient, providing enough desks for the number of folks in the office on a typical day, but not one desk per person including one for all those folks who are only occasionally in the office. The idea is that when folks know they are going to be in the office, they reserve a desk to use from a pool of those available.

 The US General Services Administration is implementing hoteling as a way to reduce the amount of office space the agency needs, thereby reducing real estate costs for the agency. In these tight budget times, agencies are looking for every opportunity to reduce costs – and hoteling is one concept that seems to have arrived. Hoteling is just part of the trend toward increasing telework options and encouraging collaboration and information sharing among employees.

Are these concepts coming to research administration offices? Certainly some research administration staff are in front-line positions where face-to-face meetings with faculty and other staff are important on an ongoing basis. However, many staff perform backend functions that only occasionally require them to be in the office. Effectively coupling telework and hoteling with updated management practices could be a way to get more accomplished without having additional office space.

I’m not sure that most research administrators have noticed, but there is a major migration going on within the US federal government – IT systems are moving into the cloud. I talked about this in a recent post that focused primarily on migration of government email systems . Yesterday, word came that the General Services Administration awarded a contract to begin moving its public web presence into the could. This includes the Data.gov and USA.gov websites.

NIH has published (NOT-OD-12-035) guidance on implementation of the revised salary cap for FY 2012, reducing the cap to Executive Level II, $179,700 for FY12.

NIH also published (NOT-OD-12-034), providing information on the statutory provisions affecting use of NIH funds for FY 12. 

NOT-OD-12-036 provides guidance on NIH fiscal plans for FY12. Non-competing awards will be issues without inflation. Inflationary increases for future year commitments will be discontinued for all new and competing awards. Two percent increases will be implemented for Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award stipend levels see also NOT-OD-12-033. 

Below are a few tidbits culled from another good FDP meeting.

National Institutes of Health

• Michelle Bulls is the new appointed Deputy Director of the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration (OPERA). Joe Ellis, Director of OPERA, will retire this Summer.
• NIH Salary cap has indeed been reduced to Executive Level II, $179,700 link to recent post and this will be effective for all awards (new and non-competes) made after 12/23/2011. Due to the way the final appropriations language was written, the salary cap which formerly applied only to NIH, AHRQ and SAMSHA, now applies to all HHS units.

National Science Foundation

• Jean Feldman, head of the Policy Office for NSF, reviewed the recent news regarding updating NSF’s merit review criteria.
• Changes to NSF award terms and conditions are coming in April

 Both NIH and NSF reiterated the recent requirement from OMB to complete essentially all ARRA award spending by September, 2013. Revised award notices and/or changes to terms and conditions will be coming to everyone. Requests for extensions will require extensive justification and approval is not assured (in fact, they discourage asking…).

 There was significant discussion around the STAR METRICS project including incorporation of non-federal spending data to support institutional requests for full portfolio reporting and discussion around moving into Level II reporting, which includes an element of individual faculty and student tracking to be able to report on the long term impact of research funding. This discussion provided a great platform for ensuing presentations on SciENCV (the “common federal researcher profile” project) and the ORCID project to establish an open source-based unique identifier for researchers to facilitate disambiguation of publications and other scholarly outputs and link individuals with their outputs, awards, and other public or private CV elements.

The National Institutes of Health has updated its NIH Data Book with 2011 data. In a blog post discussing availability of this newly released data, Dr. Sally Rockey, Deputy Director for Extramural Research, noted a few highlights including:

• Overall success rates for R01s fell to 18%
• Success rates for new vs. established investigators were equal, at 15%
• Success rates for men vs. women were equal, at 15%
• Individual investigator grants represented 60% of awards

The data book provides summary statistics on extramural awards.

NASA has historically prohibited commercial firms from collecting profit or fee, however that prohibition did not explicitly include other applicants such as universities and non-profits. The proposed rule extends the prohibition on payment of profit or fee to all grant and cooperative agreement recipients.

Comments may be submitted through March 12, 2012 via the Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov; search for RIN 2700-AD79. Comments may also be submitted to R. Todd Lacks (Room 5J75), NASA Headquarters, Office of Procurement, Contract Management Division, Washington, DC 20546. Comments may also be submitted by email to: todd.lacks@nasa.gov.

NIH published  notice of an RFI requesting input into recommendations being developed regarding enhancing diversity including underrepresented minorities, persons with disabilities and persons from disadvantaged backgrounds in the biomedical workforce. Input is solicited regarding people in all career stages. 

As background for this RFI, the NIH notice references an article in the August issue of Science that identified racial disparities in NIH R01 applications and the accompanying policy discussion.

Sally Rockey, Deputy Director for Extramural Research at NIH blogged on this topic around the time of the Science article publication as well. 

Responses to this RFI will be accepted through February 24, 2012 via this web page: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfi_files/nih_dbrw/add.cfm

Grants.gov published an updated request form and procedures for use by institutions to set up web certificates for System-to-System submission. The new procedure and form are available here: http://grants.gov/applicant_s2s/applicants2s_faqs.jsp#q5

Note that in order for submissions to the Grants.gov UAT (test) environment to be processed through to the NIH Commons UAT (test) environment, a specific request for installing the certificate on the UAT environment in addition to the production environment is required.