The Office of
307 Bynum Hall
Campus Box 4106
UNC-Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-4106
Tel: (919) 962-6136
Huge. A sea change. The biggest thing to happen to UNC since e-mail. And these are just a few of the things people at Carolina are saying about RAMSeS.
By now, more than a thousand users at UNC have logged on to RAMSeS (Research Administration Management System and e-Submission), including research administrators, faculty members and business managers.
RAMSeS replaced Coeus as Carolina’s grants management system on July 1. And based on feedback from campus users, there are big plans for RAMSeS.
“We’ve been watching it for the last month and a half, working out all the odds and ends,” said Andy Johns, director of information systems and management for research and economic development. “We have an ambitious schedule of enhancements, and it’ll only speed up over the next few months or so.”
The biggest enhancement, Johns said, will be adapting RAMSeS to handle the changes in Grants.gov, the federal grants application and management system.
Beginning Feb. 1, 2007, all federal agencies will accept only electronic R01 proposals. Seventy-five percent of UNC’s research funding comes from the federal government, and a significant portion of those funds come from R01 proposals. Johns and his team of developers plan to be ready for the February deadline by October.
In the past, Grants.gov has only accepted paper proposals. A federal mandate has changed that, and now all federal agencies are moving to electronic proposal submission.
“And any time you move from a paper-based to a paperless system, there are a lot of changes,” Johns said.
Another major enhancement in the works, Johns noted, is making the Grants.gov proposal documents, or PureEdge documents, available for multiple users simultaneously. The current PureEdge documents work much the same as an Adobe Acrobat PDF — a user can download the file and enter data, but only one person can access the document at a time.
Because of the collaborative nature of proposal writing, Johns said, he and his team are developing PureEdge documents that can be downloaded and saved to server space assigned specifically for document and proposal storage. This way, he said, someone overseas could be working on the proposal at the same time as someone on Carolina’s campus.
Johns will speak at the next meeting of the Research Administration Support Group on Sept. 6. The meeting will take place in the auditorium of the Bioinformatics Building from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Johns will talk about where RAMSeS is headed and will report on feedback from campus users and consequent major upgrades for the fall.
The Office of Sponsored Research will hold RAMSeS training sessions for anyone interested in learning more about how to most effectively use the system.
Upcoming training sessions will be held in Room 3101 of the Administrative Office Building, 104 Airport Drive, at the following times:
Provided by Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle
Writer: Margarite Nathe