News & Notices

How many cupcakes do you have to sell to fund a scientific mission to Mars? Organizer Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute doesn’t expect to fund space exploration via cookies and car washes. He does hope to build interest in planetary science and awareness of NASA budget cuts and the need to repair them across the country on Jun 9th, as PhDs at 20-30 institutions offer up their best baked goods and wash your car. Watch this site and if you are at or near one of the participating institutions – you might want to drop by on June 9th to support the cause – or just get your car washed by a rocket scientist.

Many will remember Sen. William Proxmire’s (D-WI) Golden Fleece Awards, established in 1975 and designed to call attention to perceived wasteful government spending, frequently focusing on federally funded research projects.

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), with the support of a bipartisan group of Representatives and several business, university, scientific, and public policy organizations, announced the creation of the Golden Goose Award. The new award is designed to recognize important discoveries that flowed from federally-funded basic research projects that may have seemed “unusual, odd or obscure” at the time they were funded, reflecting the serendipitous nature of basic research. Golden Goose Awards will be for work that occurred in the past rather than current work that may lead to future breakthroughs.

In the Academic Minute, a program of WAMC Northeast Public Radio and Mount Holyoke College, I noted an example of unexpected outcomes from seemingly obscure research at work just this week. The research of Dr. William Wood, a professor of organic chemistry at Humboldt State University, focuses on chemical ecology – how plants and animals use chemicals to communicate. In a study looking for marking pheromones in California black-tailed deer hoof gland secretions, Dr. Wood came up empty handed. However, he wondered why deer rub these glands over their bodies if not for pheromone-based communication. It turns out that chemicals in the secretions inhibit the growth of athlete’s foot fungus and acne bacteria, and may lead to the development of new classes of antibiotic and anti-fungal agents of use in human medicine.

Who knew? And that’s the point of basic research – and why its so important that we fund it adequately and manage it effectively.

As expected, the DATA Act was passed by the US House of Representatives today. Submitted and sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), it was passed by voice vote. The Act establishes a new Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency Commission, which will take over the activities previously the purview of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. The DATA Act requires reporting on all tiers of subawards and includes a reporting threshhold of $100,000.

Added to the bill in recent days, were provisions responding to the recent GSA conference debacle. The bill will cut Federal agency spending on conferences by 20% from their 2010 levels, cap spending on individual conferences at $500,000 (although additional funding from outside sources could increase this level), and limit the number of attendees to international meetings to 50 unless the secretary of state determines more are needed. These match provisions added to a US Postal Service overhaul bill in the Senate expected to be voted on today as well.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) is the sponsor of the Senate version of the DATA Act. The focus now shifts to the Senate, which has not substantially considered the bill yet. The bill is with the Senate Budget Committee.

The general opinion regarding the DATA Act seems to be that it is likely to move forward and be passed. Generally speaking, the DATA Act would codify the quarterly reporting initiated for ARRA awards broadening the scope to cover all federal awards and incorporate the FFATA subaward reporting requirements. There is certainly more to it than that – and there remain certain details to be worked out before passage. Lessons learned from ARRA reporting are being carefully considered by those involved in thinking about the DATA act and its potential implementation. It will certainly mean additional work for research administration offices. However, the hope is that this might also lead to less fractured reporting and thus, eventually result in overall less burden. The devil will truly be in the details there.

In anticipation of the DATA Act coming up for a floor vote in the house soon, the current version of the bill has been posted by Rep. Issa. Comments and suggestions to improve the bill can be submitted.

While it seems unlikely this bill will move substantially forward, it is worth noting that Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO) submitted HR 4370 “[t]o require new policies and procedures to address duplication and inefficient spending in the Federal grants process.”

The bill would require each applicant for a grant from an Executive agency to submit, as part of the application for the grant, the following information:

1. A list of each similar Federal grant the applicant applied for during the one-year period preceding the date of submission of the application.
2. A list of each similar Federal grant the applicant received during the five-year period preceding the date of submission of the application.
3. A statement of whether the applicant has ever been debarred or suspended by an Executive agency from receiving Federal grants and, if so, a list of each such debarment or suspension.

In the case where the applicant fails to fully disclose, s/he could be debarred and awards could be revoked.

Agencies would also be required to establish better methods and provide sufficient information to allow other agencies to better identify potential duplication.

Dual use research of concern is “that research with the highest potential for yielding knowledge, products, or technology that could be misapplied to threaten public health or other aspects of national security.” A Public Consultation Meeting is being held on July 15, 2012 on the NIH Campus in Bethesda, MD to review the proposed criterion for identifying dual use research of concern.

More information is available on the website of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and in the announcement for the Public Consultation meeting.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has proposed changes to its funding paradigm. CIHR has proposed two tracks of funding: Foundation/Programmatic Scheme focused on investigators with a separate track for new/early career investigators, and Project Scheme, which is about funding projects.

Researchers are worried that the one aspect of the new program, which would allow experienced and successful researches to apply for a single seven-year grant rather than multiple shorter-term grants worry they would get significantly less overall funding than under the current system. Researchers are made all the more anxious over concern that the overall budget for research will include a cut in the CIHR budget. Uncertainty over future funding is already affecting researcher’s ability to recruit new staff, as reported by Ann McIlroy in The Globe and Mail.

The announcement of the Big Data program was made at a conference titles “Challenges and Opportunities in Big Data”, jointly sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Big Data initiative is a major research effort involving various US Federal agencies and over $200 million in funding. Big Data refers to large, diverse, complex, longitudinal, and/or distributed data sets generated from instruments, sensors, Internet transactions, email, video, click streams, and/or all other digital sources available today and in the future.

NSF and NIH will fund projects related to various aspects of the Big Data program. Applications will be submitted to NSF. After joint peer review, awardees likely to be funded by NIH will be asked to reformat their application and resubmit it for processing at NIH. Other agencies that participated in the Big Data announcement are the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the US Geological Survey, according to Brian Taylor on the Talkin’ Cloud blog.

NIH Director, Dr. Francis Collins, announced at the Big Data conference that the data set produced by the 1,000 Genomes Project – the world’s largest set of data on human genetic variation – is now publicly available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

More information on the NSF and NIH Big Data initiative programs is available on these sites: NSF Big Data Announcement; NIH Big Data Announcement.

NIH uses the Just-in-Time (JIT) method for investigators to provide certain information about grant applicaitons following review. The JIT procedure reduces the time to award while ensuring accuracy and timliness of the necessary information.

Electronic submission of JIT information through the eRA Commons is required beginning April 20, 2012 (NOT-OD-12-101).

Beginning April 20, 2012, applications receiving an impact score of 40 or less will receive a standard notice and request for submitting JIT information. This level reflects NIH’s new Impact Scoring system and current tightened paylines, though it does not reflect any individual IC’s payline.  Notices will be sent via e-mail from NIH eRA Commons to the Project Director(s)/Principal Investigator(s) two weeks after release of the impact score indicating the importance of beginning the JIT process, particularly the need to obtain any necessary IRB and IACUC approvals. In the future, NIH will review the JIT notification trigger level to determine if additional adjustments are needed to improve the process.

For all applications, the eRA Commons JIT link will be opened and available for submission of JIT information within 24 hours after the impact score has been released.  This supersedes NIH’s former business practice of only opening the JIT link for applications receiving impact scores within a certain range.  Since the JIT link will be available for all applications, applicants should not rely on this as an indicator of the need to submit JIT information; instead they should rely on the JIT notification described above and any specific requests from NIH staff.

At the present time, JIT information must be submitted via the eRA Commons. NIH understands that many institutions using S2S systems would like to be able to submit their JIT and other information through those systems via S2S and has indicated that they intend to provide this service in the future.

The GRANT Act, H.R. 3433 the Grant Reform and New Transparency Act of 2011, seeks to establish new standards for awarding federal grants. It would require agencies to base award decisions merit-based procedures and to evaluate the prospective awardee’s ability to successfully carry out the grant before awarding it. It requires establishing a public website for finding federal grant opportunities and award information – including application deadlines, standard eligibility criteria and available funds, etc.; copies of the award notice; the proposal, applilcation or plan; selection criteria such as numerical rankings by reviewer if used; the name, title and employer of each peer reviewer or other reviewer of the proposal. The Act also requires a plan for improving the single audit process.

The Congressional Budget Office recently determined that implementing the GRANT Act would result in minimal additional costs – less than $1 million per year over the 2012-2017 period, primarily from preparig additional reports and updating agency web sites.

It appears the CBO may have missed the costs associated with establishing the single portal site for all opportunitiy and award information (this would be a significant extension of the current Grants.gov site) – not to mention the annual operating costs for Grants.gov.

Perhaps the most serious concerns with the GRANT Act are those associated with required posting of proposals and peer reviewers associated with awards. The GRANT Acti has not moved forward since it was Reported by Committee on Nov 17, 2011.