Hi, Dianne--
Our procedure (it doesn't live in a formal policy) is to strongly encourage use of S2S whenever it is an available option. The one notable exception to that is for NSF proposals, where we strongly encourage using research.gov. In both cases, that stance relates to the fact that the preferred option provides much better and far more detailed validations and compliance checking than the other option.
Grants.gov does minimal compliance checking - basically, all it does is verify that you've completed all required sections of the proposal and that there is some document attached in every place it expects a document to be attached. It does no checking of the documents that are attached, so you can have situations where grants.gov validates a proposal, only to have the sponsor reject it for non-compliant file attachments. Using Cayuse Proposals, however, you get much more detailed checks - it will run whatever validation the sponsor's system runs as you're building the proposal, so you'll usually know right away if there's something amiss. It will even catch odd-sized pages in a PDF file (for example, if an international collaborator used an A4 page for their letter of support, rather than the US letter default that most sponsors expect).
With NSF, we prefer research.gov primarily because there's still no good way in S2S to account for the (fairly common) situation where a senior person is not taking salary from the project and so doesn't appear on the budget pages. Basically to account for that, you have to submit the S2S proposal and then initiate a budget update after submission to take the unwanted senior person(s) off. We'd prefer not to have to do that much work (and NSF accounts for a big chunk of our federal funding), so we default to research.gov instead.
Hope that helps with your dissenters!
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Michael Spires
Research Development Officer
Oakland University
Rochester, MI
(he/him)
mspires@oakland.edu------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 03-11-2024 13:15
From: Dianne Nagy
Subject: Require use of S2S?
Does your institution require applicants to build their Grants.Gov proposals in S2S, or do you simply recommend it as a useful, but optional, tool? Do you have an institutional policy that defines expectations for the use of Cayuse for submissions? We are just starting to gear up for implementation and target users are already pushing back, wanting to continuing building their applications in Workspace.
Advice on navigating this resistance, sample policy language, and/or talking points to promote S2S use would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
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Dianne Nagy
Assistant Vice President for Research Development and Administration
South Dakota State University
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