What's New: RAO Updates

Research-related news from around the School and the world

Rise of 'Altmetrics' Revives Questions About How to Measure Impact of Research

June 19, 2013

Chronicle of Higher Education

Steven B. Roberts's 103-page tenure package features the usual long-as-your-arm list of peer-reviewed publications. But Mr. Roberts, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies the effects of environmental change on shellfish, chose to add something less typical to his dossier: evidence of his research's impact online.

He listed how many people viewed his laboratory's blog posts, tweeted about his research group's findings, viewed his data sets on a site called Figshare, downloaded slides of his presentations from SlideShare, and otherwise talked about his lab's work on social-media platforms. In his bibliography, whenever he had the data, he detailed not only how many citations each paper received but how many times it had been downloaded or viewed online. The strategy was part of "an attempt to quantify online science outreach," he explained in his promotion package.

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National Science Foundation Presents plans to Improve Oversight of Grants using Data Driven, Risk-based Methods

May 6, 2013

Harvard Office for Sponsored Programs

The National Science Foundation (NSF) presented their plans to improve oversight of grants using data driven, risk-based methods as a way to identify institutions that may not be using federal funds properly and also to discover questionable expenditures. NSF plans to use their own internal resources for getting at this data plus some external websites and, of course, recipient financial systems and other records (general ledger, effort reports, equipment and property records, travel and purchase cards, subrecipient monitoring).

This presentation covered approaches used by the National Science Foundation Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Georgia Institute of Technology for university grant oversight. Universities can enhance program and financial oversight of grants by using automated techniques to save time and to extend their overview of program execution.

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What's the Secret to Getting Grants?

April 24, 2013

Philanthropy News Digest

Two new faculty members, both from top graduate programs, start as assistant professors. A few years later, one has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in external grants, while the other has won only a small internal award. What was Professor No. 1's secret? As a university grant officer and occasional Chronicle columnist, I've talked with senior professors at my own institution about how to kick-start a successful research career.

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Ford Foundation Shares Results of Grantee Perception Report

April 16, 2013

Philanthropy News Digest

The New York City-based Ford Foundation has announced that its most recent Center for Effective Philanthropy-issued Grantee Perception Report rates the foundation highly in most areas and shows improvement compared to the results of its 2008 report.

Based on survey responses from nearly two thousand grantee organizations, Grantee Perception Report: Ford Foundation 2012 gave the foundation high scores for advancing knowledge in its grantees' fields and for its level of involvement in the development of grantees' proposals, rating it higher in both categories than the median score for comparable large private funders as well as the foundation's 2008 scores.

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Bringing People Into Focus: How Social, Behavioral and Economic Research Addresses National Challenges

April 8, 2013

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the nation’s preeminent federal agency that funds basic science and engineering (S&E) research across all disciplines. For more than 60 years, NSF has been a significant catalyzing factor that has figured prominently in improving everyday life for millions of Americans and people around the globe. Central to that effort is NSF’s research portfolio in the social, behavioral and economics sciences. NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) funds more than half of the university-based social and behavioral science research in the nation, basic research that offers unique contributions to many areas impacting human behavior, society and survival. This publication brings people into focus by highlighting human elements through examples of basic SBE research that address critical national needs.

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National Science Foundation-Funded Social Science Research Directly Benefits Americans

April 5, 2013

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) released a summary brochure today that shows how important human-focused research is to critical national needs. Titled "Bringing People Into Focus: How Social, Behavioral and Economic Research Addresses National Challenges," the brochure provides examples of the ways in which NSF-funded, basic, social and behavioral science research bears on national security and economic interests.

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Senate Moves to Limit NSF Spending on Political Science

March 21, 2013

Chronicle of Higher Education

Congress took a giant step on Wednesday toward easing the threat of another budget stalemate, but the price of securing that compromise will continue to be felt at research universities and especially at those involved in political science. The Senate, by a vote of 73 to 26, approved a measure to finance the government through the end of the fiscal year, on September 30. The bill is expected to win approval in the House of Representatives. But the legislation would restore very little of the 5-percent cut in the budget of the National Institutes of Health that took effect on March 1 as a result of a process known as sequestration.

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Federal Overhaul of Rules for Human Research Hits Impasse

March 11, 2013

Chronicle of Higher Education

After nearly two years of effort, a bid to rewrite the federal rules governing research involving human subjects appears to be stuck, with little optimism for a way forward.  Universities and researchers pressing for changes in the Common Rule, which governs the ethics of biomedical and behavioral human-subjects research, gained an apparent breakthrough in July 2011, when the federal government's Office for Human Research Protections formally outlined some proposed revisions and asked for public comment.

The time seemed ripe. Social scientists, in particular, were frustrated by rules that often left simple attempts at public-opinion surveys bogged down in bureaucracy for months. And the Obama administration, upset by recent revelations that federal scientists in the 1940s intentionally infected Guatemalans with gonorrhea and syphilis, was also eager for changes.

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Impact of FY 2013 Sequestration Order on NSF Awards

February 28, 2013

Subra Suresh, National Science Foundation

As you may know, since passage of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, the President has been working with Congress to reach agreement on a balanced deficit reduction plan. If an agreement is not reached by the end of this month, the President will be required to issue an order on March 1, 2013 that will implement across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration. As a result of this expected sequestration order, the Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 appropriations of the National Science Foundation (NSF) will be reduced by 5 percent. We intend to make the necessary FY 2013 reductions with as little disruption as possible to established commitments, and are using the following set of core principles to guide our sequestration planning activities.

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White House Delivers New Open-Access Policy That Has Activists Cheering

February 22, 2013

Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education

The Obama administration announced on Friday a major new policy aimed at increasing public access to federally financed research. The policy, delivered in a memorandum from John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, applies to federal agencies that spend more than $100-million a year to support research and development.

In the memo, Mr. Holdren directed those agencies to develop "clear and coordinated policies" to make the results of research they support publicly available within a year of publication. The new policy also requires scientific data from unclassified, federally supported research to be made available to the public "to search, retrieve, and analyze." Affected agencies have six months to decide how to carry out the policy.

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Museums Grapple With the Strings Attached to Gifts

February 4, 2013

Patricia Cohen, New York Times

For museums and other institutions confronted with the sometimes onerous restrictions that donors place on major gifts, forever can be a very long time. In Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still keeps most of its galleries illuminated at the equivalent of candlelight because that’s how Mrs. Gardner wanted it when she died in 1924. In Tennessee, Fisk University, facing possible closing, needed court permission to sell a stake in an art collection that the artist Georgia O’Keeffe had donated with the proviso that it never be sold.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) On NSF Proposal Preparation and Award Administration - January 2013

January 15, 2013

National Science Foundation

See the link below for updated pdf of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) On Proposal Preparation and Award Administration - January 2013.

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Don't Underestimate NSF's New Grant-Submission Rules

January 9, 2013

Karen M. Markin, Chronicle of Higher Education

The National Science Foundation is making changes in its submission process that will affect grant proposals turned in on or after January 14. The changes are not earth-shattering, but you won't be able to submit your proposal online if you don't follow the new rules. Following are some key changes in the NSF's Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (you can read it in its entirety here. The foundation received nearly 49,000 proposals in fiscal year 2011-12 and awarded money to 24 percent of them. Don't become part of the 76 percent simply because you weren't aware of the new rules.

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