Below are a few tidbits culled from another good FDP meeting.
National Institutes of Health
- Michelle Bulls is the new appointed Deputy Director of the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration (OPERA). Joe Ellis, Director of OPERA, will retire this Summer.
- NIH Salary cap has indeed been reduced to Executive Level II, $179,700 link to recent post and this will be effective for all awards (new and non-competes) made after 12/23/2011. Due to the way the final appropriations language was written, the salary cap which formerly applied only to NIH, AHRQ and SAMSHA, now applies to all HHS units.
National Science Foundation
- Jean Feldman, head of the Policy Office for NSF, reviewed the recent news regarding updating NSF’s merit review criteria.
- Changes to NSF award terms and conditions are coming in April
Both NIH and NSF reiterated the recent requirement from OMB to complete essentially all ARRA award spending by September, 2013. Revised award notices and/or changes to terms and conditions will be coming to everyone. Requests for extensions will require extensive justification and approval is not assured (in fact, they discourage asking…).
There was significant discussion around the STAR METRICS project including incorporation of non-federal spending data to support institutional requests for full portfolio reporting and discussion around moving into Level II reporting, which includes an element of individual faculty and student tracking to be able to report on the long term impact of research funding. This discussion provided a great platform for ensuing presentations on SciENCV (the “common federal researcher profile” project) and the ORCID project to establish an open source-based unique identifier for researchers to facilitate disambiguation of publications and other scholarly outputs and link individuals with their outputs, awards, and other public or private CV elements.