Office of Research Services (ORS)

Get Internal Approval

Grants and international projects

Obtaining internal approval on your research funding proposal—via an official signature—plays a significant role in the submission process. When a proposal is internally approved, signed and submitted, this process legally binds the university.

We carefully review each research proposal and follow the Signing Authority Policy that has been approved by the Board of Governors. In most cases, the signature of the Vice President Research or designate is required on proposals.

Note, however, that a ORS review of all proposals is mandatory, whether or not the funder requires an institutional signature on the proposal.

Required documents

Before a signature can be sought and your proposal approved internally for submission, a number of documents are required to be on file in the Office of Research Services:

  1. Your proposal, including a budget and all required supplementary documents (e.g., CVs).  We will review it to ensure compliance with Dalhousie and funding agency guidelines, and where appropriate, will provide you with comments and suggestions on how it might be strengthened. Please ask yourself these questions before submitting your proposal to us:
    • Did I format the text, spacing, margins, and headers in accordance with agency rules?
    • Did I verify the maximum page number?
    • Did I recheck the budget calculations?
    • Did I apply the correct overhead rate?
    • Did I select the correct signing authority? 
  2. A completed, fully-signed Investigator Checklist:

Internal deadlines

Submitting your proposal to ORS for internal approval

Internal deadlines enable us to make sure that your proposal is submitted correctly and on time. To ensure that we can review your proposal adequately and obtain the necessary signature, we must receive your proposal package, with all documents noted above, at least five business days before the funding competition deadline. For grant applications requiring a letter of support and/or institutional commitments and signatures, we request a minimum of ten business days.

Certain federal and provincial opportunities require additional time to review, and have specific internal deadlines:

Funding opportunity

Internal deadline

(Number of weeks prior to competition deadline)
CIHR Project 2 weeks
NSERC CREATE 5 weeks (internal commitee)
NSERC Discovery
 3 weeks  
NSERC RTI 2 weeks  
SSHRC Insight 2 weeks  
SSHRC Insight Development 2 weeks
SSHRC Partnership LOI 2 weeks  
SSHRC Partnership 4 weeks (internal committee)
SSHRC Partnership Development 2 weeks  


Contracts

If you wish to initiate contracted research, please contact us early in the contract process. We can help determine the correct contract requirements and conditions for your research. We negotiate the terms with funders, facilitate the signing of the agreements and request accounts to be opened for your projects from Financial Services.

Find out more about the contract process.


Questions?

Read our FAQs or contact us.

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