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Facilitate collaboration between universities and Federal laboratories Working Group on Alignment of Funding Mechanisms and Scientific Opportunity Description: Scientist to scientist linkages across organizational boundaries enhances the potential for creative and innovative progress in science. One type of linkage is shared resources and infrastructure. Scientists at universities and federal laboratories are willing and interested in such linkages but there are burdensome administrative policies and procedures that inhibit collaboration. In order to facilitate such collaborations, the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) asked the Department of Energy (DOE) to address long-standing issues relating to subcontracts between DOE National laboratories and educational institutions. These issues include the use of non-standard terms and conditions that often prolong negotiations and delay subcontract execution, non-standard requirements for the amount of support documentation required to process payments, and non-applicability of some clause flow down to nonprofit institutions. In addition, there are times when money flows from a university to a DOE laboratory, usually for multi-investigator and multi-disciplinary projects funded by another federal agency. In these cases, DOE requires the university to use its ‘work-for other process,’ which is also burdensome and may take an inordinate amount of time to complete. The universities did not appear to have similar problems with other federal laboratories. Scope and Key Results: The short term objective is to develop a model subcontract for standard research awards between DOE laboratories and universities/non-profit organizations. Once the model is developed, the subcommittee will determine if the model is appropriate or can be modified for use with other federal laboratories. If it is deemed appropriate, the Working Group may propose a policy memorandum form OSTP to heads of agencies recommending its use for other contractor operated federal laboratories. The subcommittee members will also work with DOE to determine if its work-for-others process can be simplified when funds flow from universities to DOE laboratories.
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National Institutes of Health (NIH) 9000 Rockville Pike Bethesda, Maryland 20892 |
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Department of Health and Human Services |
The Subcommittee has established the following email address for receiving comments and questions related to its activities: nstc_rbm@od.nih.gov. |
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