News & Notices

In the US today, publishing powerhouse Elsevier changed course and withdrew its support of HR 3699, the Research Works Act, introduced by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) on Dec. 16th. Elsevier said, “While we continue to oppose government mandates in this area, Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself.” The Elsevier announcement did not directly refer to the more than 7,500 researchers who have signed The Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier.

Hours later, Reps. Issa and Maloney issued a statement in which they announced that they will not be pursuing further legislative action on HR 3699, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Both Elsevier and Reps. Issa and Maloney referenced open access journals as a bit of a wave of the future. In the UK, the government has recently jumped on the open access band wagon as well, in the Dec. 2011 publication Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth. The Wellcome Trust requires research papers funding in whole or in part with its awards to be deposited with PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central within 6 months. In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) recently announced their support for public access to the results of NHMRC-funded research.

Publication policies of an array of government and foundation funders with respect to open access is documented in Sherpa Juliet, maintained by the SHERPA Partnership, based at the University of Nottingham.

NIH has posted their estimated funding amounts distribution since FY 2008 and projected through FY 2013 here. They have broken the funding down into 233 distinct categories, and include a distinction between ARRA and non-ARRA funding.

It is important to note that the categories are not mutually exclusive, so the same dollar may be counted in more than one category for a particular fiscal year.

This report can be useful to identify trends for a particular area of health research, at least in terms of allocation of funding by NIH. This is particularly true because of the breakout of ARRA related funding, so temporary increases in a particular area can be identified as such. With a relatively granular breakdown, it should be a helpful table of data to take a brief look at.

Early next week, OMB is expected to publish an Advance Notice of Proposed Guidance in the Federal Register to solicit public comment on several ideas focused on increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of Federal programs by eliminating unnecessary and duplicative requirements, and strengthen oversight of Federal grant dollars. The document is available for review now here.

In the document, a number of ideas for reform are put forth for consideration. T Broadly, three areas are considered in this Notice: reforms to audit requirements, cost principles, and administrative requirements, which could ultimately result in wide ranging reforms affecting OMB Circulars A-21, A-87, A-110, and A-122 (which have been placed in 2 C.F.R. Parts 220, 225, 215, and 230); Circulars A-89, A-102, and A-133; the guidance in Circular A-50 on Single Audit Act follow-up; and the Cost Principles for Hospitals at 45 C.F.R. Part 74, Appendix E. Based on feedback to this Notice, OMB will propose formal adjustments as to some or all of those documents in coming months.

The specific ideas proposed include:

Audit Reforms

• Raising the threshold for requiring a Single Audit from $500,000 to $1 million in Federal awards.
• Reducing the scope of Single Audit requirements for entities with Federal awards between $1 million and $3 million
• Full Single Audit would still be required for entities with over $3 million in Federal awards, however modifications are considered that would: (1) streamline requirements to focus on stewardship of Federal funds specifically focusing on improper payments, waste, fraud, abuse, and program performance; (2) strengthen guidance to Federal agencies on audit followup; (3) reduce burden on pass-through entities and subrecipients through cross-agency coordination and having audit followup by agencies directly with subrecipients who receive most of their Federal funds as direct awards except in cases where the issues were with program delivery.

Cost Principle Reforms

• Consolidate cost principles for all recipient types into a single document, still allowing for variation by entity type where appropriate.
• Move to flat rates in lieu of negotiated rates for indirect costs. Two options are described for implementing this: establish a mandatory flat rate lower than the recipient’s in place negotiated rate, or allow institutions to choose between a flat rate and a negotiated rate. The goal is to reduce Federal indirect cost commitments and reduce the burden on entities for documenting their indirect costs for a negotiation process.
• Explore alternatives to time-and-effort reporting, including consideration of the project certification pilot currently in process with the Federal Demonstration Partnership, other ongoing pilots, or through new pilots to explore alternative methods to adequately document the allowability and allocability of salaries and wages charged to Federal awards.
• Extending the Utility Cost Adjustment to other institutions to make access to this option more equitable. This would likely come with a requirement for recipients to develop a plan to reduce utility costs over time for the adjustment to be approved.
• Allow directly allocable administrative support costs to be charged to direct costs on awards. This would include such costs as project-specific activities such as managing substances/chemicals, data and image management, complex project management, and security.
• Allow certain computing devices to be direct-charged to awards. This would allow computer equipment below the institution’s equipment threshold to be direct-charged to awards rather than managed as indirect costs.
• Harmonizing cost principles to clarify that $5,000 is the threshold for an allowable maximum inventory of unused supplies that may be retained for use on other Federal awards at no cost.
• Eliminate requirement for conducting studies of cost reasonableness for large research facilities.
• Eliminate restrictions on use of indirect costs recovered for depreciation or use allowances.
• Eliminate lease-purchase analyses to justify interest costs prior to relocating federally  sponsored research programs from a debt-financed facility.
• Eliminate specific requirements for printed ‘help wanted’ advertising to reflect appropriate alternative media in use today.
• Allow for budgeting of contingency funds for certain awards.
• Request that the Cost Accounting Standards Board increase the minimum threshold to file a disclosure statement of cost accounting standards from $25 million to $50 million.
• Allow for excess capacity in anticipation of increased usage for certain facilities such as data centers.
• Allow costs for efforts to collect improper payment recoveries.
• Specify that gains and/or losses due to speculative financing arrangements are unallowable.
• Provide non-profit organizations with an example of the Certificate of Indirect Costs similar to that provided for state, local, and tribal governments.
• Provide non-profit organizations with an example of indirect cost proposal documentation requirements similar to that provided for state, local, and tribal governments.

Administrative Requirements Reforms

• Create a uniform set of administrative requirements for all grant recipients through consolidating the requirements in OMB Circulars A-102 and A110.
• Require agency consideration of each applicant’s financial risk in addition to the merit of the proposal prior to making an award. Agencies would be required to consider factors such as: financial stability, quality of management and internal control systems, history of performance, Federal award Single Audit reports and findings for previous awards, and other factors that might affect the applicant’s ability to comply with statutory, regulatory, or other requirements imposed on recipients.
• Require agencies to provide 90-day notice of funding opportunities to ensure applicants have sufficient time to prepare applications.
• Establish a standard format for funding opportunity announcements.
• Reiterate that information collection actives are subject to the Paperwork Reduction Act.

Specifically, OMB seeks responses to a list of provided questions derived from the ideas outlined above, although they welcome suggestion of additional ideas from the community as well. Comments will be accepted for 30 days after the Notice is published in the Federal Register.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a construction grant to Boston University Medical Campus to partly fund the design and construction of one of two National Biocontainment Laboratories. These advanced biomedical research laboratories are essential to the civilian biodefense initiative, providing critically needed Biosafety Levels 2, 3 and 4 research space. The basic and translational research to be conducted in these laboratories over the next 20 years would result in development of new rapid diagnostic assays, vaccines and therapeutics for protection of the American public against intentional misuse or release of harmful biological agents or toxins and naturally emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases.

Today, NIH published the Draft Supplementary Risk Assessment for the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory under contraction at the BioSquare Research Park, Boston. Comments on the Draft Supplementary Risk Assessment must be postmarked no later then May 1, 2012. A public hearing to solicit public input will be held on April 19, 2012. Copies of the Draft Supplementary Risk Assessment and a companion reader’s guide document is available here: http://nihblueribbonpanel-bumc-neidl.od.nih.gov/default.asp

In the US and many other nations, programmatic overlap of awards is generally to be avoided. This is clearly articulated by the NIH in their Grants Policy Statement description of Other Support associated with their Just-in-Time procedures. It is perfectly fine to submit funding applications to multiple sponsors for the same body of work, however, it is important to recognize that if your wildest dreams come true and multiple funders want to offer awards – you can only accept one of them. While it is tempting to submit the same body of work to multiple funders to get around the problem that the work to be done will cost more that is practical to ask for from a single sponsor, that needs to be done by figuring out how to divide the work into smaller definable components and then seeking support for discrete portions of the work from each sponsor. 

Craig Grimes, who was a professor of electrical engineering at Pennsylvania State University until 2010, pleaded guilty to fraud charges stemming from accepting grants from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to fund the same research. Additional details of this case were published in Nature on Februay 7, 2012. apparently, the charges again him also include misappropriation of NIH funds. Other similar cases related to scientific overlap have also generated penalties. Predictably, Congress is getting in on the action; the House held a hearing on Jan 24th in which representatives questioned whether agencies were sufficiently evaluating applications for potential overlap prior to making awards. 

This is the kind of thing that could easily work its way into agency OIG work plans in future years and result in additional requirements beyond the current expectation that investigators disclose any overlaps and that institutions do not accept multiple awards for the same body of work.

On Feb 10th, the Small Business Association (US) published new guidelines in the Federal Register. 37 small business size standard for 34 industries and three sub-industries in the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) were increased. These changes take effect March 12, 2012. These changes were the result of a new comprehensive review of size standards, the first such update since the early 1980s. The small business industry associations are evaluating these changes. Obviously, such changes will impact the specific businesses that can be used in developing a small business plan.

The National Science Foundation (US)  published today a summary report for 2011. The report demonstrates that NSF awards dropped in number by 13.9% between FY 2010 and FY2 2011; there were 7% fewer proposals in FY 2011 relative to FY 2010 also . This was the second year of decline in number of NSF awards (2009 to 2010 decline was 11%). NSF’s funding rate for 2011 declined slightly, by 1%, relative to 2011.

The report provides additional details on the sources of NSF funding, the nature of NSF’s award portfolio (e.g., grants, cooperative agreements, contracts), the types of recipients, and the purposes of the awards (e.g., research and related, equipment and facilities, education). It also provides an overview of NSF’s progress toward meeting 2011 performance goals designed to help the Foundation achieve its three strategic goals identified in its 2011-2016 strategic plan, Empowering the Nation Through Discovery and Innovation. Director Subra Suresh’s OneNSF vision for the future is also described in the report.

In a briefing after the budget was announced, Science Insider reports on the specific “new grants management policies” that would support increasing the number of new awards.

In order to squeeze more grants out of the flat budget—the target is an 8% increase in new grants, to 672, for a total of 9415–NIH will put in place new grant management policies. Continuing grants will be cut 1% below the 2012 level, competing grants wouldn’t get inflationary increases in future years, and NIH will add a new layer of review for proposals from investigators who already have at least $1.5 million in funding.

Still, the success rate is projected to bump up only slightly from this year’s all-time low of 18% to 19%, NIH says. And although new grants will rise, the overall number of funded grants will actually drop by 56 to 35,888.

Today, the NIH announced the first of several Finding Opportunity Announcements (FOA) rolling out electronic submission for administrative supplements.

This FOA (PA-12-100) is available for prior approval requests to nearly all active grant awards (in accordance with Section 8.1.2.11 of the NIH Grants Policy Statement), however, there is no guarantee funds are available from the awarding IC or for any specific grant.  All applicants are encouraged to discuss potential requests with the awarding IC (either the parent award’s assigned Grants Management and Program Staff, or the contacts listed in Section VII of a specific Administrative Supplement FOA).  Additionally, prior to submission, applicants must review the awarding IC’s web site to ensure they meet the IC’s requirements.  A list of those web sites is available at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/admin_supp/index.htm.

This signals the beginning of NIH’s pilot project to accept many administrative supplement requests electronically either directly via the Commons or by submission via Grants.gov, which supports institutions using system-to-system.

Today, the President’s proposed 2013 Federal budget was presented to Congress and released to the public. In an effort to assist the public with access to the President’s budget request, the Government Printing Office has provided a web app, which can be accessed on smart phones and other devices. The web app is available here: http://m.gpo.gov/budget

Whether you review the budget on the mobile app, online via FDsys or you snag a paper copy, I think you’ll find there is no additional information to be had regarding this statement: “…proposes new grant management policies to increase the number of new research grants by 7 percent.” And, the budget Fact Sheet that I linked to in a previous post remains the best short summary of how the administration proposes to allocate funds across all agencies.