Authored by:
Jason Claes
Assistant Director - SRS Accounting
University of Cincinnati
Email: claesjj@ucmail.uc.edu
While working for a dean at a School of Public Health, I discovered that the university lacked an institution-wide process or method for reviewing private-industry agreements. The university had only a Central Research Administration Office (CRAO) to review pre-awards for non-profit or government-funded research projects, which was not helpful when the School was awarded $400,000 of in-kind contribution from Sun Microsystems to build a digital health library. When the dean and the School were looking at the value and status of what this award would provide, they had overlooked a fundamental condition of accepting the award - Sun Microsystems would become the “sole” vendor of computer server needs not only for the School but for the whole University. The University could not comply since they had prior contractual vendor agreements due to an existing bidding process.
In catching this essential detail, I was able to point this condition out and engaged not only our CRAO but the university’s legal and purchasing departments to help negotiate different terms and conditions. After much communication, the terms of accepting the award were amended to allow the School to independently use the sponsor as a “preferred” vendor instead of being the “sole” vendor – and thus allowed the acceptance of the award.
By going through this process, it was discovered that each individual school within the institution lacked a pre-award administrator to both act as a buffer in reviewing contracts and have the ability to negotiate terms and conditions with private-industries that were specific for their school. As a result of this issue, each school was charged with creating a departmental-level research administrator position to 1) review and communicate any pre-award conditions with the CRAO, and 2) request resources from other departments - such as the legal or purchasing - to assist in the review of private-industry awards. This created a structure for reviewing agreements that would benefit each school and revised the role of the CRAO to provide guidance and resources throughout the review process.
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