Author: Roger Wood

Responding to concern from universities, businesses and other institutions, the Mozilla foundation has approved moving forward with establishing an Extended Support Release (ESR) version of Firefox.

In a blog post <http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2012/01/10/delivering-a-mozilla-firefox-extended-support-release/> on January 10th, Mozilla agreed to develop a plan to establish a version of Firefox that would be updated once per year with interim security updates but no functional enhancements. Standard releases of Firefox roll out about every six weeks now in an effort to ensure that the browser stays at the forefront of current technology. That rapid upgrade cycle is impractical for institutions with managed software deployments, which led to the decision to establish the ESR version.

A Bill in the House of Representatives (HR 3699) sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, the Research Works Act, seeks to block federal policy requiring free access to federally funded biomedical research results. While this Bill has gotten some attention as yet another salvo in the ongoing debate between free access to publicly funded research outputs and the rights of publishers to appropriate compensation for the value they add to published papers.

In an opinion published in the NY Times on January 10, 2012, Michael Eisen, Associate Profession at University of California, Berkeley and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), took aim at Issa’s Bill.

The Association of American Publishers favors Issa’s Bill, arguing that publishers coordinate peer review and provide other value and deserve appropriate compensation for those services. NIH has maintained that through their policy of allowing for a delay of up to 12 months before papers must be posted for free access, publishers do have time during which their interests are protected. Eisen contends that open-access journals published by PLoS demonstrate that traditional publishing is not the only route to high quality peer reviewed literature and is encouraging use of such venues to shift the balance in this ongoing debate.

The National Science Board, NSF’s oversight body, will maintain the two Merit Review Criteria – Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact – according to a new report recently published.

The Board determined that both criteria were important and appropriate. They have more clearly defined the two Criteria and provided a common set of principles for evaluating them. The Board also acknowledged that broader impact may be impractical to assess for small small projects individually.

These enhancements will be incorporated into an updated version of the Grant Proposal Guide.

The Advisory Committee to the Director of NIH has issued a Request for Information to collect information from the community that can be used to develop recommendations regarding the “management, integration, and analysis of research data and administrative data. 

Comments are being collected through March 12, 2012 and must be submitted electronically at:  http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfi_files/nih_di/add.cfm

 Questions about this RFI should be directed to the following e-mail address: ACD_DIWG@mail.nih.gov

 

The migration to cloud computing is off and running in the US Federal Government. In February, 2011, then US CIO Vivek Kundra published Federal Cloud Computing Strategy , wherein he noted that as much as $20 billion of the $80 billion in Federal Government IT spending is a potential target for migration to cloud computing solutions. Agencies were directed to evaluate their technology sourcing strategies to include consideration of cloud computing solutions. OMB expects to save $5 billion annually by 2015 by transferring approximately 25% of the governments computing to the cloud according to Joseph Marks in NextGov.

While all systems are under consideration for migration to cloud services, email is an early target for many agencies including the General Services Administration was the first agency to transition its email services to the cloud, which was completed in June 2011. Commerce is the latest agency to transition its 25,000 employees to cloud-based Google mail. HUD, Education, EPA, Interior, Justice, Labor, Social Security, and Archives (NARA) have all identified email as a target for early transition. Overall, Agencies identified a total of 78 systems to migrate within the first year of this new program.

Universities, and large and small businesses are evaluating and migrating many services to cloud infratstructure and/or systems – like Google’s GMail, Google Docs and Google Apps for Education.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently published The Economic Impact of Publicly Funded Research Conducted by AAMC-Member Medical Schools and Teaching Hospitals.

In 2009, the report noted, federal- and state-funded research by medical schools and teaching hospitals added nearly $45 billion to the US economy. This represents a return of approximately $2.60 in economic activity for every dollar invested by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in medical research at these institutions. Approximately 300,000 jobs, representing 1 in 500 US workers, were supported by publicly supported medical research at AAMC-member medical schools and teaching hospitals.

This results of this analysis may be helpful in encouraging additional federal, state and local funding, having demonstrated the significant return on investment for our economy of publicly-funded medical research.

The US Congress passed an omnibus bill to fund remaining government departments including the NIH late last week and over the weekend. In the final bill, the NIH salary cap was set at Executive Level II, currently $179,700. This represents a reduction of $20,000 per year from the Exec. Level I limit, which the cap has been pegged to for the past decade. (See Section 203 in the bill.)

Previous versions of the budget leading up to this final bill passage had varied between setting the cap at Executive Level II or the even lower Executive Level III.

Before leaving for home Friday evening, the House approved an omnibus spending bill that includes $30.7 billion for NIH, which is $299 million above last year’s appropriation but is $758 million less than the President’s budget request. The Senate is expected to approve the spending bill on Saturday. Although details are not yet available, it seems likely that the NIH salary cap may be reduced to Executive Level III, currently set at $165,300.

In a report  released this week, The Government Accountability and Transparency Board (GATB) made several recommendations to improve federal spending transparency. Recommendations include: (1) Expanding on tools and techniques developed by the Transparency Board through its Recover Operations Center and leveraging FederalAccountability.gov, providing access to forensic and analytical tools for federal agencies and enforcement authorities. (2) Expand on lessons learned through the Transparency Board’s data collection procedures using FederalReporting.gov, including standardized data sets and centralized systems. (3) Establish a universal award ID – a common numbering scheme for all federal awards across agencies.

Legislation to authorize a permanent GATB, the DATA Act, is currently working its way through Congress.

OMB issued memorandum M-11-34 on September 15, 2011, which notified agencies that spending on Recovery Act awards should be accelerated to complete projects and spending by September 30, 2013. Unspent Recovery Act funds after that date will be reclaimed by the Agency. Exceptions can be granted, but are expected to be quite limited, for example, multi-year projects involving high-speed rail development.

This is being achieved through modification to the terms and conditions of existing awards. NIH published today its Guide Notice NOT-OD-12-014 announcing their policies to implement this change on their awards. NSF also published  information today for grant recipients on how they will handle this change in award terms.