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Not sure where your grant paperwork needs to go next? Don’t have time to walk to five different offices to score the necessary signatures?
You’re in luck. Starting July 1, thanks to big changes afoot in Electronic Research Administration, your grant and contract management will become a lot more efficient.
This summer, Carolina is trading the old grants management system for a new one, and making researchers’ lives easier in the process.
Instead of funneling your grant proposals through Coeus, you’ll log on to UNC-grown RAMSeS (Research Administration Management System and e-Submission). RAMSeS will not only save time by centralizing research data, it will automatically route your internal processing form (IPF) paperwork everywhere it needs to go — and keep you abreast of its progress.
The main difference for researchers: a new feature called “My Research at Carolina” (my.research.unc.edu).
This web portal for faculty and staff will be a one-stop shop where investigators and research administrators can see what research they’re associated with and get real-time status updates about those projects.
They’ll also be able to view the details of a grant proposal or clinical trial, including intellectual property disclosures, conflicts of interest, and information about human and animal subject protection.
RAMSeS will even feature user-friendly one-click options to guide users through the proposal process, such as “create new proposal,” checklists, and a “submit” button that lets you know when you’re done.
Much of this information was available before, but not all in the same place, said Andy Johns, director of information systems and management for research and economic development.
He predicted RAMSeS would make the proposal process more efficient and make managing compliance issues less complicated.
“When you file a grant proposal online through RAMSeS, it knows who you are and what protocols or studies you have in other offices,” said Johns.
This will be especially helpful with multi-departmental proposals, he said, where filing paper-based IPFs required researchers and their assistants to run around to different places asking for documentation.
IPFs will now be fully electronic: no running necessary.
And with better-integrated data available in real-time status, catching compliance errors will be quicker and easier.
“We centralize the data not just to show what the institution as a whole is doing, but to ensure that the research being conducted on campus is in compliance with all the regulations that exist,” Johns said.
But will you know how to use it? Johns said using much of the RAMSeS system would be intuitive because everything besides the “My Research” and “Research Contacts” features are similar to what people were using before the switch.
By July 1, all the old Coeus links will be updated to redirect people to RAMSeS. So researchers and administrators will log in to RAMSeS, see the data they were working on, and pick up where they left off.
In-person training for researchers is scheduled for the following times and locations:
Visit cfx.research.unc.edu/res_classreg to register.
Some training resources for the new system should also be available online two to three weeks before July 1.
Provided by Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle
Writer: Colie Hoffman