May 8, 2008

2009 NEH SUMMER STIPENDS AWARDS: $6,000 DEADLINE: October 1, 2008

Over the past four years, NEH has awarded almost 350 Summer Stipends to allow faculty members to pursue their scholarship during the summer months. While the program remains consistent with previous years, please note two important changes:

--An increased stipend. Last year NEH increased the amount of a Summer Stipends award to $6,000.
--A new method of applying. Beginning last year, just as with NEH Fellowships, Summer Stipends will be accepting applications online only through Grants.gov

ELIGIBILITY

The Endowment's rules involving eligibility for Summer Stipends include the following:

a) Previous recipients of NEH Summer Stipends must wait five years before they re-apply. Individuals who received awards in 2004 or after cannot apply for a 2009 Summer Stipend.

b) Degree candidates can apply only if they have completed all work, including any kind of requirement for an oral defense of the dissertation, by October 1, 2008.

c) U.S. citizens or foreign nationals who have been living in the United States or its jurisdictions for at least three years prior to the time of application are eligible to apply for a Summer Stipend.

d) A person who has received a major fellowship or research grant in the academic year 2006-2007 or after is not eligible to apply. A "major fellowship or research grant" is a postdoctoral award of at least $10,000 that provides support for a continuous period of time equal to at least one term of the academic year (for example, a quarter or a semester); that enables the recipient to engage in scholarly research, personal study, professional development, or writing; and that comes from sources other than the recipient's employer. In this regard, sabbaticals and grants from a person's own institution are not considered major fellowships, nor are stipends and grants from other sources supporting study and research during the summer.

e) Summer Stipends recipients may hold other research grants during the tenure of their awards, but they must devote full-time to their Summer Stipends projects for the two months of their grant tenure.

NOMINATIONS AND PROCEDURES

a) Except in the cases of exemption noted below (see Items c and d), applicants teaching full-time in colleges and universities must be nominated by their institutions.

b) Each college and university may nominate two members of its faculty for the Summer Stipends competition. As noted above, each can be either a junior or a senior faculty member. The Summer Stipends program defines junior nominees as academic applicants at the rank of assistant professor or instructor or who are at comparably early stages of their careers. Those holding the rank of associate professor or professor will be considered senior nominees.

c) Adjunct faculty, part-time faculty, academic faculty with appointments terminating by the summer of 2009, and other scholars not employed by colleges or universities are exempt from nomination and may apply online directly to the NEH.

d) Non-faculty college and university staff members are eligible for the Summer Stipends program and may apply without nomination provided that they will not be teaching during the 2008-2009 academic year. They should submit their applications online directly to the NEH through Grants.gov

Any faculty member with a humanities project may apply for nomination for a Summer Stipend. The field of the project determines the eligibility for nomination to and application for NEH Summer Stipends, not the field of the applicant.

Villanova’s nominating official is Dr. Milton T. Cole, Assistant VP of Academic Affairs, ORSP (Milton.Cole@villanova.edu). Please use this information on the online application. Since the nominating official's e-mail address is a key identifier in this online process, applicants must be sure that it is entered correctly.

The results of the competition will be announced in March, 2009. For more information, please see the NEH website: http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/stipends.html

May 6, 2008

Social Science Research Council Seeks Workshop Directors: $10,000 DEADLINE: October 3, 2008

The Social Science Research Council seeks senior faculty from doctoral degree-granting programs at US universities to identify research fields and serve as research directors for the 2009 Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) program, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Research directors will lead groups of 12 graduate fellows in two workshops (scheduled for May 28 - 31, 2009 and September 10-13, 2009) that frame summer predissertation research for graduate students chosen for five different research fields. These research fields refer to subdisciplinary and interdisciplinary domains with common intellectual questions and styles of research. Full descriptions of the 2007 and 2008 research fields are available on the program Web site: http://programs.ssrc.org/dpdf.

Research directors must be tenured and experienced supervisors of dissertation research and must apply in teams of two from two institutions. Each research director will receive a stipend of $10,000. Proposals should describe the relevance of the research field, the kind of graduate students who might be recruited, and the kinds of activities that would be entailed in each of the two workshops, along with a short bibliography and curricula vitae of the two research directors. Applications must be submitted via the online application portal by October 3, 2008.

April 30, 2008

Fulbright Scholars Program

The Fulbright Scholar Program is offering lecturing, research or combination lecturing/research awards in over 130 countries for the 2009-10 academic year.

Opportunites are available not only for college and university faculty and administrators but also for professionals from business and government, as well as artists, journalists, scientists, lawyers, independent scholars and many others. There are awards in 45 different fields or disciplines, and a variety of subdisciplines and interdisciplinary fields.

While foreign language skills are needed in some countries, most Fulbright Scholar lecturing assignments are in English. Nearly 70 percent of the awards include a lecturing component.

Application deadlines for 2009-2010 awards are:

August 1, 2008 for Fulbright traditional lecturing and research grants or for Fulbright Distinguished Chair awards worldwide

November 1, 2008 for the summer German Studies Seminar and for spring/summer sessions in Korea and Japan for academic and international education administrators

February 1, 2009 for the US-Germany International Education Administrators Program

Rolling deadline for the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program

For more information, please visit the CIES website, or contact :

Allison Lam
Research Information Officer
Office of Research and Sponsored Projects
Villanova University
610-519-6127

April 28, 2008

NIH Public Access Policy

Dear Members of the NIH Research Community,

I am writing to remind you that the mandatory NIH Public Access Policy (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-08-033.html) applies to final peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008. Making published research funded by NIH accessible to everyone, including health care providers, patients, educators and scientists, helps advance science and improve human health. We all have a role to play in achieving this goal, and I appreciate your efforts to make the NIH Public Access Policy successful.

The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (see http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm), which was signed into law late last year. Compliance with this Policy is a legal requirement and a term and condition for all active grants and contracts awarded as of April 7, 2008. Failure to comply may trigger one or more enforcement actions, depending on the severity and duration of the non-compliance.

Please see the Public Access Web site for the tools you need to comply with the Policy. The Web site houses Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), training information, and other resources.

To ensure compliance with the Policy, please remember to:

Address Copyright - Make sure that any copyright transfer or other publication agreements allow your paper to be submitted to NIH in accordance with the Policy.

Submit Papers upon Acceptance for Publication
1. Some journals will submit the final published article on your behalf, without your involvement. See http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm for a list of these journals.

2. For any journal other than those on this list, please:

• When submitting a paper for publication, inform the journal that the final peer-reviewed manuscript is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy.
• Make sure that any copyright transfer or other publication agreement allows the final peer-reviewed manuscript to be submitted to NIH in accordance with the Policy. For more information, see the FAQ Whose approval do I need to submit my article to PubMed Central? and consult with your Institution.
• Submit the final peer-reviewed manuscript to NIH upon acceptance for publication at http://www.nihms.nih.gov/. See the Submission Process for more information.

• When citing your NIH-funded papers in NIH applications, proposals or progress reports, please include the PubMed Central reference number (PMCID) for each paper.
• NIH will monitor compliance through citations. Effective May 25, 2008, when your NIH Program Officer reviews your progress report or application, he or she will be expecting a PMCID in the citation of every applicable paper that arose out of your NIH funding, or a manuscript submission system reference number (NIHMSID) if the PMCID has not been issued. See Section C of our FAQ for examples.
• If you publish through a journal listed under http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm, there might be a slight delay in assignment of a PMCID. That is okay. We have signed agreements with these journals that allow NIH to resolve submission with them without your involvement. To facilitate your Program Officer’s job, we ask that you indicate ‘PMC Journal- In Process’ until the PMCID is available.

April 18, 2008

Graduate Assistant Salaries for FY 08-09

Effective September 1, 2008, graduate assistant salaries will increase to $1,456 from the previous year's rate of $1,406. Please note this change in your upcoming proposals.

View the fact sheet.

April 11, 2008

Congratulations to the VERITAS Faculty Research Recipients

The Office of Research and Sponsored Projects is pleased to announce the VERITAS Faculty Research recipients for 2008 and offer congratulations to the successful applicants.

• Dr. Marilyn Fetter, Nursing, "Promoting Homeless Individuals' Health Literacy"
• Dr. Julie Klein, Philosophy, "The Debate about Religious Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe"
• Dr. Anna Bonta Moreland, Humanities, "The Nature of Inter-Religious Dialogue: Medieval Resources for a Contemporary Problem"
• Dr. Michael Tomko, Humanities and Augustinian Traditions, "Firmly I Believe, and Truly: English Catholic Spiritual Writing"
• Dr. Michael Waddell, Philosophy, "Toward a Deeper Unity for Jews, Christians, and Muslims: A Study of Prophecy in the Writings of Maimonides, Aquinas, and Avicenna"

April 8, 2008

New Online Course Satisfies NIH's Human Subjects Training Requirement

PI's applying for NIH awards which use human subjects must satisfy the NIH human subjects training requirement. NIH's Office of Extramural Research's course "Protecting Human Research Participants" replaces the National Cancer Institute's "Human Participant Protections Education for Research Teams" course in satisfying NIH's human subjects training requirement. This free online course can be obtained at http://phrp.nihtraining.com/users/login.php

For more information on the Requirement for Education on the Protection of Human Subjects, please visit http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/hs_educ_faq.htm .

For assistance on the transition from the old course, please visit http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/learning/humanparticipant-protections .

April 4, 2008

Annual Effort and Performance Report Summaries due by May 15, 2008

After a thorough review of Villanova University’s time and effort reporting procedures on sponsored grants and contracts, auditors have determined that an additional review must take place annually to confirm that the amount of effort and the research performance of all persons working on federal grants and contracts meets or exceeds award requirements. OMB Circular A-21, Section J, 10 c (e), states:

• To confirm that distribution of activity represents a reasonable estimate of the work performed by the employee during the period, the record for each employee will include:
• the signature of the employee or of a person having direct knowledge of the work, confirming that the record of activities allocable as direct costs of each sponsored agreement is appropriate; and,
• the record of costs will include the signature of responsible person(s) who use suitable means of verification that the work was performed and is consistent with the overall distribution of the employee's compensated activities. These signatures may all be on the same document.

February 18, 2008

Congratulations to the Summer Research Fellowships & Research Support Grant Recipients

The Office of Research and Sponsored Projects is pleased to announce the Summer Research Fellowships and the Research Support Grants for the summer of 2008 and offer congratulations to the successful applicants.

View the official announcement.