Our research enterprise is on a bold path to ensuring that our research is more agile, efficient, and impactful, with greater returns on investment for the well-being of our state, nation, and world. The Research Roadmap, the University’s strategic plan for research success, guides this transformation. This blog is the first in a series designed to share progress on our Roadmap initiatives, starting with a major overhaul of a program that touches every researcher’s life: our Conflict of Interest (COI) program.
As researchers push the boundaries of knowledge, our institutional support systems must adapt to keep pace. That’s why we’re excited to announce a complete overhaul of our COI program. Guided by Research Roadmap priorities, this transformation will enhance compliance, reduce administrative burden, and create a clearer path to collaboration and commercialization.
The Roadmap to a Better COI Program
Commercializing and translating university research are essential to transforming discoveries into real-world solutions, driving economic growth, and securing the lasting impact of the research enterprise. Yet too often, overly cumbersome COI processes create barriers and slow (or even block) progress which delays innovations, devices, and lifesaving therapies from reaching the public.
A robust, transparent, and accessible COI program is critical to removing these roadblocks and ensuring that sponsors, including American taxpayers, see the full return on their investment in research. It also safeguards research objectivity by providing transparency, thus protecting research integrity and enabling collaboration and translation to advance responsibly. The program must deliver on all of this, while being appropriately designed for clarity, efficiency, and minimal burden.
Until 2024, the COI program was managed by the University’s Institutional Integrity and Risk Management Division, which isolated COI from the broader research enterprise and created barriers to efficiency and collaboration. Later that year, the program was moved to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR), creating the opportunity to build a unified approach that is transparent, efficient, and researcher focused. Moving the program to the OVCR was a critical first step in a complete system and policy overhaul, a rare opportunity to build a truly best-in-class program from the ground up.
Immediately following the transition, we commissioned an external COI program review by a team of experts from top institutions like Stanford, University of Virginia, and Memorial Sloan Kettering to evaluate our current processes and identify opportunities for improvement. The external experts reviewed internal documentation and processes, met with the COI team, faculty, and staff, and provided a final report to OVCR leadership. The results were clear: our system was overly complex, burdensome, and inefficient.
In 2024 alone, our researchers submitted over 60,000 disclosures. We found that a significant number of faculty and staff were “high-volume submitters,” meaning that some individuals submitted over 140 disclosures in a single year. As can be imagined, this volume of disclosures created a heavy administrative burden and, counterintuitively, it risked disclosure fatigue, which can reduce accuracy and compliance. The COI program also managed over 1,600 management plans, many of which were for minor financial interests that fell well below federal disclosure thresholds.
Another considerable issue was that the old process required a “project-specific disclosure” for every new protocol or award. This meant that every time a new project was proposed, each member of the research team had to have a new disclosure, which created interruptions to project start up.
The team, under Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research Compliance Quinton Johnson, used the external review report to create a change management plan, and then began revisions to the Activities, Interest, and Relationships (AIR) system and the University’s COI policies and program.
Moving from Volume to Value
The core of our new program is a shift in philosophy: from a high-volume, low-value approach to one that prioritizes efficiency and impact. We want our researchers to focus on what they do best: groundbreaking science. To achieve this, we’re implementing three major changes:
- One Annual Disclosure
We are eliminating the need for project-specific disclosures. Instead, researchers will submit a single annual disclosure of financial interests, updated within 30 days for new financial interests. This one-time action will replace the redundant filings and repetitive paperwork that some investigators had to submit over and over throughout the year. - Continuous Review
We are shifting the administrative work from the investigators to the COI team. With the new annual disclosure model, our team will proactively review disclosed financial interests against new protocols and awards as they come in. This continuous review process means that researchers won’t have to interact with the system every time a new project begins, dramatically streamlining the start-up process. - Formal Financial Conflict Management
We’re simplifying our management plan process. Our new approach will focus solely on financial conflicts of interest that meet the U.S. Public Health Service definition. This means we’re moving away from managing minor interests and focusing our efforts on the most significant risks. We expect this change to reduce our total number of management plans from over 1,600 to fewer than 300, freeing up valuable time and resources for both researchers and staff.
What’s Changing and What’s Not
The new COI framework is a significant change, but our core commitment to research integrity remains the same. The goal of this new program is to enhance compliance and protect the objectivity and credibility of our research. Here’s a quick overview of what to expect:
What’s Changing:
- Simplified Policies: We are creating separate, straightforward policies for research COI, university COI (vendor and procurement), and conflicts of commitment (external professional activity for pay), making it easier to find the rules that apply to your specific situation.
- Redesigned System: Our electronic system, AIR, is being completely overhauled to support the new annual disclosure and continuous review processes.
- Simplified Training: Annual training will now be a quick, one-page overview that you’ll complete when you submit your annual disclosure. This replaces the old, time-consuming model and ensures everyone is up to date on our latest policies.
What’s Staying the Same:
- Commitment to Compliance: We remain fully committed to meeting all federal regulations and policies. In fact, these changes bring us even closer to what the federal rules require.
- Researcher Accountability: While we’re reducing the administrative burden, researchers remain responsible for fully and accurately disclosing their financial interests. The program is built on a foundation of trust and accountability.
- Maintaining Research Excellence: Our top priority is to support our faculty by getting out of the way of their research. By simplifying our processes, we’re freeing up time for what matters most: creating and disseminating knowledge.
Timeline and Next Steps
We are currently in the final stages of policy and system development, with a planned rollout for our annual disclosure period from mid-January to the end of February 2026.
Between now and then, we’ll be providing extensive training and support, including webinars, a new website, and guidance materials. We know this is a big change, and we want to ensure everyone is comfortable with the new system and process. More information will be shared soon. Rest assured that we will closely monitor implementation, gather user feedback, and validate workload reduction targets so we can implement process refinements as needed.
I want to extend my appreciation to Quinton Johnson and his team for the incredible amount of work they put into the rebuilding of our COI program. And we are so grateful to Chancellor Roberts for his support in reforming the program with its move to back to the OVCR. This transformation will have a lasting effect and stands as a testament to our pursuit of research excellence and integrity.
We’re excited about the future and the opportunity to support you in your groundbreaking work. Next month, I’ll continue our Roadmap updates by highlighting how we’re enhancing our research assets and finding new ways to grow Carolina’s research enterprise.