FAQ

Please contact the ORS office at ors@LUC.edu or call 773-508-2471. Another office that can help with locating sources of gifts and charitable grants is Corporate and Foundation Relations.

Yes. The Office of Research Services can provide publication assistance to aid faculty in the preparation or publication of books or article-length manuscripts. We will pay 50% of the total cost up to $1,000; the remainder must be covered by your unit’s Chair or Dean.

Or, if you have secured a contract from a university press, ORS can provide a publishing subvention in the amount of $2,000 to defray the publication cost of a forthcoming book.

More information about these ORS programs can be found at Grants Administered through the Office of Research Services. You are also strongly encouraged to enlist the help of your department chair or college/school dean with funding for these endeavors.

There certainly is, by signing up with the Pivot (formerly called COS) database. You can sign up by going to https://pivot.proquest.com/session/login  while using your office computer and then clicking on “Register for a Pivot account” to the right of the log-in button. After registering, Log-in and click the orange "Search" button at the upper right of the screen and conduct a search (or searches). You can save your search(es), and have the option of  receiving weekly alerts that include any new opportunities that match. Once you've registered using your office computer, you can then log in and use COS from anywhere. You may also create a personal professional profile in Pivot, which will enable other scholars to find you, by following the instructions at https://pivot.proquest.com/register.

An additional option is to sign up for a PTAP account. Once an account has been created, you can submit your research interests in the ORS Faculty Research/Scholarly Interests Database. The purpose of this database is to match you to potential funding opportunities tailored to your individual research or scholarly interests, based on keywords you have chosen for topics within your general research interest(s). Once you have established a profile, funding notices that contain any of your keywords will be sent to you automatically. Keywords are the same as those used by the Pivot database, which are accessible via creating a profile.

Find your department name in the left-hand column of the ORS staff list. In the right-hand column you'll find the name of your ORS contact. 

Please see the procedure outlined at Proposal Submission.

An outline of the procedure for handling these types of situations is found here.

All Loyola faculty members are eligible to become principal investigators. Students may serve as principal investigators if a faculty member is designated as a faculty advisor in the PTAP. Full time staff members may act as principal investigators with approval from their supervisors.

It depends on the sponsor. If allowed and that is what you want, we can show more than one PI in the proposal. However, for internal purposes, the first PI shown will be considered to have overall responsibility for the project and be designated “Principal Investigator” while other PIs will be termed “Co-Investigators.”

Contact ORS as early as you can. This is especially true of proposals that need to be submitted electronically because of the possibility of computer crashes and automatic rejections that need correction and re-submittal.

This will vary depending on the specific proposal, but generally each investigator will need to sign the PTAP, along with the relevant chair(s) and dean(s) [or functional equivalents], in addition to the institutional endorsement provided by ORS.

“PTAP” stands for Proposal Transmittal and Approval Process. It is an on-line system developed by ORS to help manage and document the grant proposal process, and to make it easy to secure required approvals. You can log in to the PTAP system by going to https://ptap.LUC.edu. If you don’t already have a user ID and password, there are links on that page to request them from Information Technology Services.

You will be asked to complete a Disclosure of Financial Interest Form and return it to ORS. If it is determined that a conflict does exist, this doesn’t mean that you won’t be allowed to submit the proposal. But the potential conflict will have to be managed (e.g., by additional project oversight).

Find your department name in the "Academic Unit" column of the ORS staff list. In the right-hand column you'll find the name of your ORS contact. Please email your ORS contact, who will add you to the NSF database and assign you a password to access the FastLane. 

Find your department name in the "Academic Unit" column of the ORS staff list. In the right-hand column you'll find the name of your ORS contact. Please email your ORS contact, who will add you to the NIH eRA Commons and assign you a User ID. NIH will then email you with additional information, a username and password to access the eRA Commons.

We strongly recommend that you let your Research Administrator (RA) know so that the RA can determine if a PTAP should be created. If the sponsor is a foundation or corporation, entering an LOI into the PTAP system will automatically notify CFR. Sometimes a sponsor will describe what is needed as a “Letter of Intent” or a “White Paper/Pre-proposal” but will also require budgetary information and/or cost share commitments, and these should be run through the PTAP so that when we receive the go-ahead to submit the formal proposal there won’t be any surprises (e.g., a cost share commitment that the dean is not willing to make).

Go to Facilities and Administration Costs/Fringe Rates

Generally federal rules require that secretarial salaries not be directly charged but instead be treated as an indirect (“F and A”) cost. The exception is a large center-type project that is large enough to require administrative support dedicated primarily to that project. In general, if such expenses are included in the approved budget, this means the cost is allowable.

See the guidance for Faculty Salary Charges on Externally Funded Projects.

These are expenses that benefit grant/contract funded activities but are of such a nature that it would not be practical or cost-effective to try to calculate what the actual benefit is to particular projects. Typical expenses are maintenance, building depreciation, library costs, and various kinds of administrative functions (purchasing, payroll, ORS, etc.) that are employed indirectly to support your research and scholarly efforts. F and A costs are reimbursed through one or more rates that are negotiated with the federal government and then, normally, are applied as a percentage of most of the direct costs incurred on particular projects. The lakeside campuses have two negotiated rates depending on whether a project is research or something else (see Facilities and Administration Costs/Fringe Rates). Keep in mind that F and A rates represent an average amount of indirect costs borne by any given project. Also keep in mind that the actual award you receive may contain restrictions on how, to what extent, and even whether F and A costs are to be reimbursed by the sponsor.

No, but ORS will need confirmation that this is the sponsor’s policy — typically this would be published on their website but it might be in the form of an email from a sponsor official. In the absence of sponsor policy, F and A costs need to be budgeted in all proposals for external support of research, training, or public service.

Typically not, if you have budgeted for stipend payments. The fringe benefit rate applied to graduate student stipends (see Facilities and Administration Costs/Fringe Rates) partially covers the tuition cost. When the PTAP form is being filled out at the proposal stage, you will be asked to complete a spreadsheet that details graduate student tuition costs, as applicable.

Both cost sharing and matching achieve a similar objective: to provide funds in addition to the sponsor's award toward the total costs of a project. Typically, cost sharing occurs when the university uses its own funds for this purpose, while matching takes place when the university raises funds from another source. Matching can also occur in situations where a sponsor requires the university to "match" what it provides on the basis of some prescribed formula (e.g., one-for-one match).

In 1977, Congress clarified the difference in the Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act. The government uses money either to acquire goods and services or to assist other organizations. Accordingly, the rules for ACQUISITION are very different from the rules for ASSISTANCE. Government agencies are required to use a procurement contract as the legal instrument whenever the principal purpose of the agreement is the acquisition, by purchase, lease, or barter, of property or services for the direct benefit or use of the federal government. An assistance mechanism is to be used whenever the principal purpose of the relationship is the transfer of money, property, services, or anything of value to the recipient to help that recipient accomplish its own purposes. There are two types of assistance mechanisms. A grant is to be used when no substantial involvement is anticipated between the government and the recipient during performance of the contemplated activity. A cooperative agreement is to be used when substantial involvement is anticipated between the government and the recipient. The distinction between a grant and a contract is sometimes not so clear-cut in the non-federal world, so ORS sometimes has to use its best guess as to how to categorize some awards from non-federal sponsors.

This is covered in http://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/ors/pdfsanddocs/research/gift_grant_determination.pdf.

It would be unusual for a sponsor to request this unless an exchange of proprietary information was contemplated. Typically this might be the case if the sponsor is actually an industry contractor and we are going in as a subcontractor on a proposal being submitted by the contractor to the government. In any event, such agreements should be reviewed and signed by the Research Services Director, Angelica Vaca (avaca1@luc.edu; x8-2480).

Under most awards, these are owned by the university. Some awards, particularly federal contracts, have special rules for purchases of supplies or equipment, and may even require approval from the sponsor for such purchases if they were not listed in the approved budget. If you need assistance interpreting the terms and conditions of your grant or contract, please contact ORS.

If sponsor rules allow it, you can have ORS request an extension of the grant end date. Call or send an e-mail to your ORS Research Administrator (you can check ‌). Explain that you need a no-cost extension, provide a valid reason (simply having funds left over is not a valid reason!), estimate how much money will be left as of the current end date (ORS will find this out from Sponsored Program Accounting), describe how the remaining funds will be spent, and put in the new end date that you are requesting (usually up to twelve months after the current end date). We will then contact the sponsor (if necessary) and you will be notified if and when the request has been approved.

Yes, usually with the sponsor's permission, although typically what happens is that the sponsor terminates the award to Loyola and makes a new award with the remaining funds to your new institution. Your Research Administrator can assist with this. 

Yes, provided you complete the Advance Account Authorization form available at SPA Grant Policies & Procedures, have the information on the 'guarantee account' filled in and authorized by your business manager or chair/dean, sign the form, and send it to ORS. We will then review/sign and forward to SPA so that an advance AU can be established. Once you have been notified by SPA that the AU has been set up, you can start spending assuming that the first day you incur costs is on or after the start date of the award. This form should also be used if you expect to receive a federal grant that allows pre-award expenditures. In this case, you can start spending up to 90 days in advance of the actual grant start date.

Click Whom to Call for a "who-to-call" list.

In each case, there is a committee that would review an application that you would submit through ORS, namely the Institutional Review Board (IRB), Institutional Animal and Use Committee (IACUC), or Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), respectively. For human subjects use, the relevant forms and information are found at Institutional Review Board: Templates. For laboratory animal use, the petition forms are found at Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). For biohazards the relevant form and information can be found at Biosafety (IBC). If your research involves radiation-producing devices or radioactive materials, you would need to submit an application form to the Radiation Safety Committee (see Radiation Safety).

You will generally need to have the Research Services Director sign a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA). MTAs are normally provided by the owner of the material and we can supply a template for this if requested. Contact Research Services Director Angelica Vaca (avaca1@luc.edu; x8-2480).

Please see the university patent policy at http://www.luc.edu/ors/patentpolicy.shtml.