A software program that is now being implemented at the three UI campuses is helping automate and expedite the processes of finding and applying for research funding from federal agencies.
More than 500 departmental users are using the UI eRA Grants Management System, software developed by InfoEd International, a company that develops technologies for researchers.
UI eRA “helps reduce the complexities of putting proposals together,” said Kathy Young, director of the Office of Sponsored Programs and Research Administration. “There is so much angst associated with that – fear of failure that they won’t get funded – that many faculty members are afraid to take that first step. Our goal is to provide a tool for them that will be as user friendly as possible, that they can engage with at any time they choose. This system allows them to access it whenever and wherever they may be.”
“A solution has been about 12 years in the making,” said Stephenie Graham, assistant director of the UI eRA Grants Management System. “The UI was trying to find an integrated tool that would automate the pre-award process and track the results. The functionality that existed in SCT Banner was not sufficient, so a third-party tool was found to provide pre-award information.”
Although the software is being implemented with as few modifications as possible, “we have some options within the application to customize it for the UI,” Graham said. “We can add certain fields and decide how to apply certain functionalities in our business processes. There are certain things we want to track that are specific to the UI. If the system doesn’t have it, we have places to put it in.”
The system also ensures compliance with a federal law that requires researchers to submit proposals electronically to federal agencies through the Web portal http://grants.gov. The Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act, Public Law 106-107, signed by President Bill Clinton on Nov. 20, 1999, mandates electronic system-to-system submission of federal grant applications. The act was intended to simplify the federal grant process and improve the effectiveness of federal grant programs, which dispense more than $400 billion in awards annually. The National Institutes of Health was the first agency to mandate submission through http://grants.gov. Other agencies are now following suit.
The UI was the first university to successfully submit an electronic proposal through http://grants.gov via the InfoEd application in 2007. Since then, several units at each campus have submitted proposals for each NIH deadline.
UI eRA’s funding search and delivery mechanisms, SPIN/SMARTS, complement other programs such as the Illinois Researcher Information Services (IRIS) and Community of Science by providing additional conduits for locating funding opportunities. A database called SPIN provides up-to-date information on current national and international government and private funding sources. Additionally, SMARTS, an electronic matching and notification database, matches investigators’ search terms or profile information with current national and international research funding opportunities and e-mails notices to users at defined intervals.
The proposal development module eases some of the burden of preparing proposals by automatically filling in standard or repetitious information. Users can save copies of proposals, curriculum vitae and other information to the system to re-use or modify as needed for subsequent submissions. Validation mechanisms within the system cross check data that are entered with proposals’ specifications to reduce errors. When they’re finished preparing a proposal, users can electronically route it for internal approval.
Once investigators and administrators have requested and received UI eRA accounts, they also can access the reporting functions, build queries to extract data from the system and export it to Excel spreadsheets. Which data users can access is determined by their defined roles in the system; departmental administrators, for example, have access to all proposals from researchers in their units while users defined as investigators can access only their own proposals.
About 160 units across the UI campuses have participated in the implementation process, and many have volunteered to use the proposal-development module, which currently supports submissions to NIH and the National Science Foundation and is scheduled to support submissions to all other federal agencies early next year. Full implementation is being phased in at the three campuses over the next several months, and UI eRA staff are working with constituents at the three campuses to develop and launch a process for all other funding sponsors.
As with any software implementation, there are issues cropping up that must be resolved before the final product is made broadly available. “With the UI being so decentralized, there are a lot of things going on that we don’t know about until they actually hit our door,” Young said. “We have to make sure that all the issues that we see get resolved before we roll out that product because there’s a potential for misunderstanding or an inability to use the product if we don’t get those things resolved.
“We’ve got an effort going on to develop a generic form set that will enable us to roll the software out to more of campus,” for submitting electronic proposals to other federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, Young said. “We’re testing that right now, identifying the issues and working with the vendor to ensure that we deliver a quality product.”
For more information about UI eRA, including online tutorials and Web events, visit the UI eRA Web site.
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