[As part of our efforts to interact with Research Administration personnel across the country, BloggingORA will occasionally feature posts written by colleagues at other institutions.  Today’s Guest Blogger is Adriel Villegas-Estrada, Senior Grants and Contracts Specialist at Weill Cornell Medical College.]

When researchers collaborate, teams come together to build on each other’s expertise and create new and exciting developments.  Two of the more popular collaboration arrangements involve the parties acting as consultants or subrecipients, each of which involves different rights and obligations.

To begin with, what is a consultant?  NIH defines it as “an individual who provides professional advice or services for a fee, but normally not as an employee of the engaging party.”  This definition does provide useful information, but is still somewhat broad.  Yes, a consultant works on a fee basis and is not normally an employee of the engaging party, but what happens if an investigator wants to engage in consulting while being a member of an academic institution?  Many universities allow their own faculty to engage in independent consulting, as they want to provide investigators with the opportunity to help others and share knowledge.  However, the general restriction is that they have to do so on their own time, which is crucial when examining consulting arrangements.

Alternatively, a subaward is the legal instrument used to provide funds to an eligible subrecipient to perform a substantive portion of a given program or project.  It is essentially a form of financial assistance, and in these cases, the subrecipient is responsible and accountable to the prime recipient for the research that is performed.

That being said, what do you do when an investigator approaches your office and requests a consulting agreement?  Depending on your policies, you might be able to simply say “No, we have to do it as a subaward.”  However, it is often times not easy to make a quick determination, and you have to find a solution.

So, is there an easy way to differentiate between what truly is consulting and what is not?  The main difference between the two is that a consultant does not do research for the engaging party, but a subrecipient does.  There are also certain questions you can ask to further determine whether or not it is research or consulting:

Will the investigator use university-owned resources and facilities?

Will the investigator receive and keep data that they may later use for secondary analysis?

Will the investigator be listed as an author or be able to publish based on their role?

Is there any intellectual property involved?

If any of the above is answered with a “yes,” or could potentially be a “yes,” it likely should not be classified as consulting, and thus the work would need to be performed under a subaward.

While there may be many compelling arguments made by investigators as to why they would rather use the consulting arrangement over a subaward, it is important to remind them that you are also trying to protect them.  For instance, many consulting arrangements require the consultant to assign all intellectual property to the engaging party.  By allowing an investigator to assign his or her rights, your institution may be in jeopardy, and could face similar consequences as were addressed in the landmark case of Stanford v. Roche.  Consequently, sponsored project offices should take care in accurately determining the appropriate contractual tool that best represents the work being performed.

[As part of our efforts to interact with Research Administration personnel across the country, BloggingORA will occasionally feature posts written by colleagues at other institutions.  Our first Guest Blogger is Brigette Pfister, Director of Proposal Development at Virginia Commonwealth University.]

Following eight years in pre-award research administration, I recently made the switch to a role in proposal development.   I didn’t anticipate just how steep a learning curve I faced, as I had thought the move to proposal development would be relatively easy.  No more last minute deadlines!  No more chasing signatures!  How hard could it be?

I’ve heard the first year in proposal development described as equivalent to earning a Masters’ degree.  Three months and several projects later, I’m a believer.  Let’s compare, shall we?

As a pre-award administrator, a proposal went something like this:

I was notified of an upcoming submission 3-5 days before the deadline, if I was lucky.  Sometimes it seemed more like 3-5 minutes.  I spent most of my time checking math, dotting Is, and crossing Ts. I filled out forms.  I educated the PI on allowability issues and university policy, knowing that we would have the exact same discussion next time.

As soon as I finished all the forms, the PI would call with budget changes.

I chased people all over campus to get signatures, and then sprinted back to my desk to push the Submit button at the last possible nanosecond.  Occasionally, faculty behaved like large, temperamental children who needed guidance and sometimes discipline.  At best, they just didn’t get it, and, at worst, they deliberately tried to sidestep the system. My colleagues and I were stressed and burned out, and the end of every day was like finishing a marathon in 90 degree heat.  Faculty members lamented, “I don’t care about Cost Principles!  I just want to do my research!”

In proposal development, a proposal goes more like this:

My PI needs to receive grants to earn tenure.  She doesn’t know where to start, but she is passionate about her research.  She is a superhero (minus the cape and spandex, thankfully) who is going to save the world; it’s great.  The problem is that no one awards funds on what she focuses.  When we finally find an opportunity, we realize that the deadline was last week, so we search some more.  We spend eons building a team, holding meetings, and calling program officers before the whole thing falls apart.

We start over.

There are egos and expectations to manage, not to mention the fact that I know nothing about genetics.  We write our proposals and we revise, until I can’t bear the thought of rejection (or having to read the thing again).  We are inevitably late getting to sponsored programs, though we know better, because we want our proposal to be perfect. Then, just when we think we’re finished, OSP says “You can’t do that, it’ll have to come out,” usually referring to some element that the PI thinks is critical, and back to the drawing board we go!

After eight years, I get to see the process from the other side, and realize that both groups have the same question: “What is wrong with those people?”

The answer, of course, is nothing at all.  It takes a dedicated team of very different kinds of people to make this whole grant thing work.  If it weren’t for the sponsored programs types, we’d send out non-compliant proposals with wonky budgets and we’d never get funded.  If it weren’t for the proposal development types, some faculty would never apply in the first place.   And if it weren’t for faculty, there would be neither sponsored programs nor proposal development, not to mention the world-saving research we’re all working toward.

Ultimately, we need each other, as we’re all on the same team.  On deadline day, though, it can be hard to tell.