June 30, 2023 update: The transition away from academic credit, originally planned for July 1, is now paused.
As mentioned in the May 15 Research Insights newsletter, after several years of discussion and with significant feedback from campus, we have been planning a July 1 transition away from UGA’s historical model of allocating “academic credit” for sponsored expenditures, awards, and proposals. Our goals are to develop and deliver improved reporting tools, promote best practices in collaboration, increase consistency in the way credit is allocated, and simplify the way research productivity is measured across the institution.
Over the past four months, our team has met with hundreds of faculty and staff in preparation for this transition. These conversations helped uncover risks and challenges to the transition as first planned, as well as potential alternate solutions to allow us to achieve the above goals more effectively and efficiently. Based on this feedback, we will pause the planned transition away from academic credit while we examine these alternate solutions.
While we are assessing, reports related to sponsored project activity will continue to be based upon academic credit. Please note this pause does not affect the original timeline for delivering new and improved reporting tools. The first such tool is the new Individual Investigator Report, slated for release this summer – this tool has undergone beta testing by a complement of individuals who represent the various user groups (faculty, staff, administrators) and as soon as released we will, of course, welcome further feedback and suggestions from all.
We are sincerely grateful for your willingness to provide feedback as well as your collaboration and partnership to ensure we move forward together in the best way possible and will provide further updates as the timeline for tools and reporting evolve.
Key Goals of this Project:
Simplification: Provide a simplified process to determining how credit is allocated during proposal preparation.- Standardization: Adopt a single methodology for measuring contributions to sponsored projects across reporting tools.
- Improved reporting: Provide new reporting tools at the college, department, investigator and center/institute levels.
Reporting Improvements
Summer 2023: The new Sponsored Project Activity Report (SPAR), which shows year-over-year trends in proposals, awards, and expenditures at the investigator level. View Sponsored Project Activity Reports here- Fall 2023: Released the SPAR List View report, which allows the user to select a college or department and view year-over-year trends by investigator on a single page. View Sponsored Project Activity Reports here
- Winter 2024: Released a draft version of the SPAR report that allows the user to toggle between academic credit and center/institute credit. View the draft/QA version here
- Coming Soon: Finalized version of center/institute credit report along with a SPA tracker that shows progress on awards and award modifications with transparency into each step of the setup workflow (i.e., where is my transaction in process).
If you have additional questions, please contact the Sponsored Projects Administration leadership team.
