skip to content

Research Operations Office

 

Published on 20 November 2020


X5 Upgrade - Tuesday 24th November 2020

X5 - the costing and pricing tool for research projects is due to be upgraded on Tuesday 24th November 2020. The upgrade will include improvements to the interface, fixes to known bugs and enable us to remain supported by the supplier. A summary of the changes to expect in X5 can be found on the slides and presentation given at RGUG on 24th September.  For the upgrade to happen, there will be a few hours when X5 and other Research Office systems will be unavailable as follows -

System Downtime on Tuesday 24th November 2020

X5

7am - 1pm

Research Dashboard

7am - 1pm

ROO Portal

7am – 11am

 

If you have any queries, please email x5upgrade@admin.cam.ac.uk.

 

Christmas and New Year Deadlines for Applications and Expenditure Statements

Due to the Christmas vacation the Research Operations Office (ROO) will close from 5pm on Wednesday 23rd December 2020 and will re-open on Monday 4th January 2021. Therefore please be aware of the following deadlines and ensure that your researchers are made aware of these arrangements.

Final Expenditure Statements due over the Christmas closure period must be confirmed to the Research Operations Office by Friday 27th November 2020.  Also please ensure that expenditure for EC grants due for reporting are posted on CUFS by the GL closing date of Tuesday 8th December 2020. This is to allow statements to be submitted to the funder, prior to the Christmas closure.

 Applications               

If you have a funder deadline between Wednesday 23rd December 2020 – Monday 4th January 2021, applications should reach the ROO by -

7 Working days deadline

Monday 14th December 2020

2 working days deadline

Monday 21st December 2020

If you have applications with a funder deadline in the first week of January, when counting back for 2 or 7 working days, Wednesday 23rd December will be the last full working day before Christmas.

You can use the online calculator to show the number of working days prior to the funder deadline that your application needs to be with ROO for checking. For example

Funder deadline

Wednesday 6th January 2021, 5pm

7 working days

Thursday 17th December 2020, 5pm

2 working days

Monday 4th January 2021, 5pm

As a reminder, the ROO asks for a minimum of four weeks’ notice of the intention to submit to a particular scheme. Some funders have very short turnaround times which means that it's not always possible to give the ROO four weeks' notice of intention to submit. In these circumstances, please continue to contact the ROO at the earliest opportunity so that we can assess the resource requirements to support the application. Full details of the deadline policy currently in place can be found on the ROO website.

 

Reminder - Research Grants User Group Meeting (RGUG) on Thursday 3rd December at 11:15am

RGUG is an open meeting led by the Research Office and is a forum where research grant administration issues and developments are discussed. The next meeting has been set for Thursday 3rd December at 11:15am and there will be an agenda item on Brexit. Please join the meeting using the link below.

RGUG Live Event Link

If you have any queries, please contact Hannah.Pawson@admin.cam.ac.uk.

 

Innovation Funding Service Portal

Innovate UK’s new Innovation Funding Service Portal (IFS) is now live and there is a suite of training videos aimed at Participants, Finance Contacts and Monitoring officers.  Everyone who was registered to use the previous system “ _Connect” has been invited to create an IFS login. If you haven’t received a login invitation, it is possible you already have an IFS account created some time ago and need to reset your password.   For further queries about access issues please email Grants_Service@innovateuk.ukri.org and include your Project number in the email header.  

 

EU Domain Names

After the completion of the Brexit transition period, any EU funded projects that have a eu internet domain name registered from the UK, will need to have their registration transferred. Therefore if you -

  • have an eu domain name registered through UIS, action will already have been taken to manage this.

  • registered an eu domain name without involving UIS, you should if possible, transfer the registration to one of your non-UK partners.  Instructions on doing this can be found at the Government website about EU domain names. Note that if the transfer doesn’t happen, the domain name will cease to be registered and may be re-registered by anyone in the EU after a one-year period.

  • have an eu domain name associated with your grant and you believe that one of your UK partners registered it, you may wish to ensure that they transfer the registration to an EU partner.