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where to start | limited submissions | budgets | approvals | collaborators | letters
conflicts of interest | routing | submitting | afterwards | useful text
Aside from internal competitions for IU funds, all grant proposals must be formally submitted through the university's Sponsored Research Services (SRS) administration. Unless you have received permission from SRS, you are not allowed to submit a grant proposal to any external organization or agency. In most cases, they take care of boxing and mailing hard copies or hitting "submit" for electronic submissions. What follows are some notes on what you must do to get that point.
Where to Start
The Sponsored Research Administration website is full of useful facts, forms, and guidance. This is a good place to start for many questions. If you can't find what you're looking for, call the SRS office at 855-0516 and ask to speak to a grant specialist.
Limited Submission Programs
Some grant programs restrict the number of proposals that can be submitted by a single department, school, campus or even university. This should be explicitly stated in the program guidelines. For such programs, IU conducts an internal competition to determine which proposals may be submitted to the granting agency. Information about internal competitions is posted on the SRS website; be sure to look at the upcoming deadlines link. Unless otherwise indicated, the required material for an internal competition is a simple 1-page description of the planned proposal and a short (1-2 page) CV. Be sure you mention anything you'll need to arrange with the university, such as a financial commitment or additional space. [As of June 2006, the contact person for limited submission competitions is Michael Wilkerson in the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.]
Budgets
A grant specialist at SRS will have to approve your budget before you will be allowed to submit your proposal. It is a good idea to send your budget to SRS a week or two in advance, so that the routing and sumission process is not slowed down by budget problems at the last minute. At the very least, they ask for 3 business days. If you're not sure how to start working on your budget, SRS has sample files you can download from the SRS forms page.
There are three ways to share a budget with SRS for review:
Keep in mind that if you include funds for a collaborator at another institution, you will have to arrange a subcontract, with which SRS can assist you.
- You may email your budget and justification to SRS (resdev at indiana dot edu) as attachments (excel, pdf, word, etc).
- You may create a budget in ERA (see below), then simply let a grants specialist know you'd like it reviewed. ERA allows you to easily access the current IU rates for fringe, salaries, etc. It also supports the NIH module format. Unfortunately, you'll have to manually transfer information from ERA to most agencies' electronic submission online forms.
- Many granting agencies--such as NSF (FastLane) and NIH (grants.gov)--support or require electronic submission, and will allow SRS grants specialists to review your budget online. In NSF's FastLane environment, the PI can set "SRO Access" in the PI functions for a particular proposal, allowing SRS to view only, view/edit, or view/edit and submit.
Research Subject and Materials Approvals
For the most part, research subjects approval from the Human Subjects Institutional Review Board (IRB) or the Bloomington Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (BIACUC) can be "pending" at the time a proposal is submitted. But the approval process must be complete before the university can accept an award. [As of June 2006, Laura Hurley is our BIACUC representative from the department. She can endorse some paperwork, and may also serve as your advocate during protocol review if you discuss details (convincingly) with her.]
Materials clearances, such as for rDNA or radioactive chemicals, generally must be in place prior to the submission of a proposal. Be sure to check into any permissions you might need early in the proposal preparation process.
Collaborators
In most situations, you'll be asked to submit biographical and funding information for collaborators and project participants. Read the format guidelines carefully--NIH and NSF request different formats and different sets of information. The grant specialist at SRS who reviews proposal will ask you correct formatting problems, such as listing too many publications or sysnergistic activities, or neglecting to list any required funding information for collaborators.
Letters
Many proposals include some sort of letter, either offering endorsement for a project, agreeing to collaborate, or offering financial support--cost share or otherwise. It is accepted procedure to offer a draft letter to your letter writer(s); this ensures that all the important points are covered, and also speeds up the process of getting back a signed copy on letterhead. [Biology departmental letterhead is available upon request from the webmaster.]
Cost Share: Keep in mind that in situations involving commitment of financial support from the university, if a dollar figure is mentioned in the letter, it usually must also be included in the budget as cost share. Cost share situations require additional oversight, reporting and finaincial management; therefore, to avoid a cost share arrangement if the program guidelines indicate that no cost share is required (for NSF, this phrase is interpreted as "please do not include cost share"), be careful that letters of support do not include dollar figures. Instead, retain documentation in your own files about the specific dollar values committed.
Conflicts of Interest
Be sure you have submitted a conflict of interest disclosure form before you try to route your proposal. This is not necessary for each proposal, but must be done periodically. A copy is kept on file with the chair's office, if you lose track of when you last filed the form.
Routing a submission
Before you will be allowed to submit your proposal, you must receive approval from: the Department of Biology (Debbie Martindale in JH 127 does this on behalf of the chair), the College (Dawn Edwards in Kirkwood Hall 104 does this on behalf of the Dean), and SRS (this is done by any of several people in the SRS suite in the basement of Carmichael Center on behalf of the Vice President for Research). You can do this quickly but laboriously (paper) or slightly more slowly but effortlessly (ERA).
Approval signatures can be gathered in person on a hard copy of the IU route sheet, available as a pdf from the SRS site. This method can be the fastest way when you've only got a couple hours before the deadline. You'll have to show your budget and any relevant letters of commitment (cost share, space, etc.) to each person signing, and leave a hard copy of the complete proposal (two copies for SRS). Only SRS actually does much more than make sure what commitments (cost share, space, etc.) are promised, so the visits are fairly quick if you can catch everyone in the office. In drastic situations, someone from the chair's office may be able to help walk around a proposal for signatures.
Alternatively, IU now has a convenient Electronic Research Administration (ERA) system that supports electronic budget preparation and submission routing as separate functions. You may submit an electronic route sheet through ERA (with an attached budget file) as soon as your budget has been approved by SRS, even if the rest of your proposal is not ready to be submitted. Although you should start an ERA route sheet at least 2 or 3 days before your deadline, you can watch its progress online from the comfort of your own computer chair as you feverishly finish your narrative section. A better strategy is to have your budget approved at least a week in advance, and immediately send off the ERA route sheet for approvals, so that that part is out of the way. You have up to 2 business days after your proposal is submitted to send the required hard copies (same nunmbers as above with the paper route sheet: 1 to Biology, 1 to the College, and 2 to SRS). It's a good idea to attach the IU route sheet to the hard copy, so that the proposal is identified and filed correctly.
To get started in ERA, follow the instructions on the ERA system access page. You will have to be added to the system as a user, which can take a day or two, so be sure to start this process in advance of your deadline. TIP: Bookmark the starting login page for ERA, once you've logged in through OneStart for the first time, so that you don't have to go through OneStart each time.
Actually submitting the proposal
NSF and many other agencies now support completely electronic submission, so that no hard copies are necessary (other than the ones required by the various IU offices). However, some proposals for NIH and other agencies still require submission of hard copies. Obviously, you'll have to have everything ready that much earlier before the deadline, to leave time for mailing.
You must supply all required hard copies. Keep in mind that the university requires some (1 for bio, 1 for COAS, 2 for SRS, plus any other units involved) in addition to any required by the granting agency. Usually, SRS takes responsibility for packaging and shipping hard copies you deliver to them, if they are given sufficient time and the proposal has been correctly routed. However, you may be required to make (and pay for) your own shipping drop-off if you're running close to the receipt date and the last Carmichael Center pick-up has already happened.
For completely electronic submissions, you should communicate with your assigned grant specialist at SRS to determine whether SRS or you is responsible for "pushing the button." For NSF proposals, SRS must do the final online submission, for which you must set SRO access to "read, edit and submit" in FastLane. For some other submissions, especially private granting programs, you are in charge of submitting the proposal, but you must receive authorization from SRS before you do so.
After submission
After your grant is submitted do not reread it. Odds are, you'll find an error and you can't change anything now, anyway. Instead, don't forget to:
- thank your letter writers and offer a copy of the proposal for their files (most won't accept)
- organize your electronic files, so that you can easily identify the file(s) of the final version of the budget, justification, narrative, etc.
Useful text:
Computing facilities and equipment in the Department of Biology: The Department of Biology supports 10 web, database, file and backup servers, over 700 desktop and laptop computers, and site licenses for nucleic acid and protein sequence analysis software as well as two ABI 3730 DNA analyzers, gel imaging equipment and software, and SEM, TEM, confocal and deconvolution microsocopes. Color laser and poster printing is made available, as are 35 mm, flatbed, and high-capacity scanners and high-speed bulk printing and reprographics. The university makes several multiprocessor clusters and a 1.6 petabyte storage system available to all researchers and maintains 24x7 phone support as well as separate offices for bioinformatics and support for statistics and mathematical software.
