Category: Industry Notices

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. 

Late last year it was announced that the US Geological Survey would lose all of the funding for its National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) program. As of the 15th of January, 2012, the website’s database will be taken off-line. The popular service gave researchers a single entry point for finding data that was compiled for multiple government agencies on the topics environmental science, species taxonomy, and disease propagation.

The site’s data is not yet available as a single archive, although they have provided a list of partner organizations, although each one will have to be accessed individually. The website has also posted a list of services that will no longer be available here. The termination of service announcement includes a statement of desire to continue to collaborate with partners, although the USGS provides no indication of what that may look like in the future.

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. 

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.