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Ten issues between federal sponsors and universities are targeted for improvement


The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) recently finalized a set of ten major issues for further action to improve business relationships between federal sponsors and the universities and organizations that conduct government-funded research. The issues identified through a process of public comment and subsequent review by the NSTC’s Committee on Science. In addition, NSTC identified a second set of issues dealing with cost policies and accounting, e.g. overhead reimbursements, to be addressed by a group of agency heads and the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The next step is for members of the Research Business Models Subcommittee to identify pros and cons of various approaches and report progress to the NSTC Committee on Science at the September meeting. The Subcommittee intends to continue consultation with the research community as they develop approaches and options to address the targeted issues.

The Committee on Science comprises all federal research agency heads or the heads of agency science divisions. The panel is co-chaired by NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, Acting National Science Foundation Director Arden Bement, and Kathie Olsen, associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The Research Business Models Subcommittee began its work during summer 2003 with a Federal Register notice soliciting comments from the broad research community, subsequently holding four regional workshops to review current federal policies and their impact on the increasingly multidisciplinary and collaborative environment of basic and applied scientific research.

The ten targets RBMS has decided to tackle first are as follows:

  1. Recognition of co-principal investigators and co-investigators on grants.
  2. Reliable, stable support for mid-size research facilities and instrumentation.
  3. Appropriate support for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the form of salaries, stipends, and adequate benefits.
  4. Removing obstacles to collaborations posed by bureaucratic requirements and excessive paperwork.
  5. Adopting standardized procedures for progress reports and financial reports.
  6. Adopting model sub-agreement templates and implementing consistent award notice formats
  7. Issuing consistent terms and conditions of awards.
  8. Development and application of federal-wide rules for research misconduct applied consistently across all agencies.
  9. A federal-wide policy for conflicts of interest applied consistently across all agencies.
  10. Revision of Circular A-133 audit monitoring requirements to stop the situation where compliant research universities working as subrecipients on each other's grants are required to monitor each other.


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