If you are going to ACRL in Minneapolis, MN (USA) next month, you may find our workshop of interest. The instructors are members of the University of Florida Open Access Committee<https://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/openaccess/ufinvests#s-lg-box-25600353>. It will be very interactive with a game, mock evaluations, and lots of opinion-sharing.
Beyond Affordability: Aligning Open Access investment decisions with institutional priorities
Not sure if folks have been following, but a few of us have spent the last few months convening the Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET <https://www.cometadata.org/blog/call-to-action-comet>). Through this process, we engaged over 80 people with expertise in research information and discussed a vision for building a community approach to metadata enrichment.
The work culminated in a Call to Action <https://www.cometadata.org/blog/call-to-action-comet>, inviting organizations and individuals to contribute resources (funding, expertise, metadata, and infrastructure) to support the first phase of a community-driven infrastructure for making persistent identifier (PID) metadata better and more complete.
I have a dumb question for the academics on this list. I have been following the efforts of the Trump administration to cap grant overheads (or indirects) at 15%. There is currently a temporary injunction blocking this from happening, at least with regard to NIH grants, before a federal court in Massachusetts.
There are rules about the allowable expenditures in any given grant program which would limit the kind of expenditures which you would make with overheads, but you could certainly do this for some of the expenditures in that package. For example, you could probably pay for a journal subscription on a relevant topic as this is still directly tied to the research (normally, this would be from the Collections budget, which is partially funded by overheads).
Indirect Cost Recovery on federal grants is a complicated business. Here are *some* main considerations that affect the answer to Michael's question. I will caution and say that we're all imagining worst-case outcomes for the changes now going on and my comments will point in that direction.
1. Under the regulations of the granting agencies and the terms and conditions of grants, there are substantial categories of things that are required to be calculated under the indirect rate. That calculation is a serious piece of work itself, with regular visits from federal accountants negotiating with local administrators
Hard to believe any administration would purposely seek to hamstring a research enterprise that is the envy of the world but here we are.
Mostly trying to envision what the worst case scenario looks like, for researchers, libraries, and universities more generally. It does not seem pretty.
On Sunday, March 9, 2025, Michael Clarke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thanks Jim. Super helpful explainer. > > Hard to believe any administration would purposely seek to hamstring a > research enterprise that is the envy of the world but here we are. > > Mostly trying to envision what the worst case scenario looks like, for > researchers, libraries, and universities more generally. It does not seem > pretty. > > Michael > Managing Partner, Clarke & Esposito > > On Mar 9, 2025, at 9:50 PM, Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > > Michael and
Looking at this from the UK and from a mainly retired position I can only sympathise. Anthony
------ Original Message ------ From: [log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Monday, March 10th 2025, 05:16 Subject: Re: [OPENCAFE-L] Grant Indirects nothing pretty about it! On Sunday, March 9, 2025, Michael Clarke <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> > wrote:
Thanks Jim. Super helpful explainer.
Hard to believe any administration would purposely seek to hamstring a research enterprise that is the envy of the world but here we are.
I'm curious to know what portion of those ICRs go to the library? Or did go before this? I'm at a small research university in Canada, and with a total library budget of about $4M CAD (including salaries, benefits, collections, etc.), we get $40K in ICR each year, or 1% of our library budget. I don't know what percent of the overall univ ICR that is, though. I checked our annual budget statement and that amount is not itemized.
This varies greatly from institution to institution. At many universities, libraries get a percentage of total institutional grant overhead (and that percentage will vary from place to place), but I worked at one research university where the library got a flat dollar amount every year that hadn’t varied in many years. The administration’s standard answer when the library inquired/complained was “No, it doesn’t go up when external research funding goes up, but don’t complain – it doesn’t go down either.”
The "Uniform Guidance" from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) outlines cost principles for federal grants, including what counts as a "direct" cost and what counts as an "indirect" cost. Whilst the guidance says "There is no universal rule for classifying certain costs as direct or indirect costs," in practice many things are clearly in one category or the other and it isn't so easy to change something from a direct to an indirect. You can find details here: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/part-200#subject-group-ECFRd93f2a98b1f6455.
I just wanted to share that many are pushing back on these challenges, as described in this Nature piece from last week: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00661-8
