Science and Technology Policy Office January 25, 2008 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

Effective with publication of this Notice in the Federal Register, research agencies will be able to utilize a new standard core set of administrative terms and conditions on research and research- related awards that are subject to OMB Circular A-110, ``Uniform Administrative Requirements for Grants and Agreements With Institutions of Higher Education, Hospitals, and Other Non-Profit Organizations'' (2 CFR part 215). This resulted from an initiative of the Research Business Models (RBM) Subcommittee of the Committee on Science (CoS), a committee of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC). One of the RBM Subcommittee's priority areas is to create greater consistency in the administration of Federal research awards. Given the increasing complexity of interdisciplinary and interagency research, it has become increasingly important for Federal agencies to manage awards in a similar fashion. In 2000, the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), a cooperative initiative among 10 Federal agencies and 98 institutional recipients of research funds, developed Standard Terms and Conditions as a model implementation of OMB Circular A-110. It was demonstrated that these terms were an effective set of requirements for many agency research awards. In 2005, following public and agency comment on the original FDP terms, final standard terms and conditions were developed by RBM. With this final notice, research agencies and awarding offices that participate in the FDP, must use the core set of administrative requirements, to the maximum practicable extent, in research and research-related grant awards to organizations that are subject to 2 CFR part 215. Likewise, agencies that have not participated in the FDP may elect to use these terms on selective awards to their research recipients. The Government-wide core set of administrative requirements are posted on the NSF Web site at: https://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/rtc/ index.jsp. As changes are made in the future, NSF will maintain both the current version and an archive of earlier versions. Research agencies will post their plans for implementing the administrative requirements either on the RBM subcommittee Web site, https:// rbm.nih.gov, or on their own Web site, in which case the RBM subcommittee will provide a link from its site to the agency's location.