Funding, News and Announcements

On behalf of Mark Filiaggi, CIHR University Delegate, Associate Vice-President Research

Hi everyone,

Following is a brief update from the June face-to-face CIHR University Delegates meeting in Ottawa (with thanks to Debora Matthews for attending in my place!):

March 2014 Open Operating Grants Competition

Overall, 2863 applications were submitted representing a 13% increase from the last competition; this included 44 early renewal applications. An additional $10M commitment has been made (every year for next 5 years) to help cushion the increased application pressure. The notice of rating and rankings did go out on ResearchNet on Wednesday (June 18). Whether this means that the overall success rates from the past competition remains to be seen. Results are expected July 4th.

Ethics update

Little was said regarding some of the concerns brought by the community around positioning Ethics within CIHR other than that the intention is to ensure ethics is not a silo within the organization.

Foundation scheme update

Identification of reviewers for stages 1 and 2 will begin after registration closes (July). Apparently CIHR with not be validating new investigators (they will find out after an application is submitted if they are not eligible) looking to take part in the Foundation Pilot. As of June 6th, 43 registrations had been submitted with another 874 in progress. Approximately 300 are current open grant holders, with nearly that number of applicant who have never held OOG funding or are new/early career researchers. CIHR projects that there will be about 700 registrations once registration closes on June 23rd.

There was some discussion of Stage 2 in this process. There will be a modular approach to capture budget requests. Applicants will need to provide current funding, and the total amount requested will be equally divided over 5 or 7 yr duration (you can ask for a different distribution). Amounts requested will be rounded to nearest $10K, and you must justify if the amount requested is higher than your current funding level. Justification will also be needed if you are a new applicant (there is historical data available on CIHR website to assist new applicants in developing the budget). Categories will include research staff, mentorship plan/trainees, consumables (animals, expendables, contract services, bioinformatics), non-consumables (equipment – within the confines of CIHR definitions), conferences/travel/KT, etc.

College of Reviewers

For this new College, multiple waves of recruitment are starting with current and recently active reviewers. There has been an Interim Advisory Group (Brett Finlay, Ivy Bourgeault, Andreas Laupacis, Martin Schechter, Gerry Wright) in place since Dec. 2013. CIHR is currently piloting the IT systems and developing recruitment strategies, though they anticipate that they will need significantly less than the original estimate of 8000 reviewers (but no specific target numbers were provided). Reviewers will be selected through a variety of mechanisms (nominated; targeted recruitment; as a condition of funding – eg., Foundation grant holders), though the emphasis first will be in finding moderators / chairs / senior researchers to help recruit. Built into the College will be plans to provide quality assessment of, and feedback to, reviewers; there will likely be some form of mandatory education (depending on the level of reviewer).

ResearchNet
 
Updates to the user home page were released on June 19, 2014. Upon log in, users will notice a new navigation bar on the left side of the page that will allow them to access their activities by role. This redesigned navigation structure is based on the results of a usability study and user testing with members of CIHR’s research community.

Renewed Canadian Common CV (CCV) for CIHR

Enhancements have been made to the publication import function. Users will now have the ability to import publication files in the BibTeX format, which is supported by several bibliographic databases including Scopus, Google Scholar and Web of Science. In addition, you will be able to import multiple PubMed records at once. As a result of these enhancements, the existing PubMed records will be migrated into the Journal Articles section of the CCV and the separate PubMed Articles section will be removed from the CCV.


Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,

Mark Filiaggi
CIHR University Delegate

Associate Vice-President Research
Filiaggi@dal.ca
(902)494-7102