Published on 2 December 2022
UKRI Guarantee Guidance Update & Draft EC Work Programmes for 2023-24
The UKRI Guarantee Guidance was updated on 3rd November 2022 for the third wave of Horizon Europe calls with a final deadline date on or before 31st December 2022. The updates include; covering the costs for personnel based outside of the UK, acknowledging UKRI funding in publications and transferring funds to other institutions. The full list of updates can be found on the latest news section of the ROO website. The FAQs on the UKRI underwrite have also been updated to reflect the current scope of the guarantee guidance.
In addition, UKRI recently announced that they have opened the Horizon Guarantee funding application routes on the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) for successful UK applicants to Horizon Europe calls covered by the current Guarantee Guidance.
There will be a webinar on 7th December 2022 about the UK’s participation in Horizon Europe and the recent UK government announcement of additional investment in research and innovation. The webinar is organised by Universities UK International, the UK Science and Innovation Network, and UKRO. Further details and registration are available on the UKRO website.
The European Commission recently published the Draft Work Programmes (except Cluster 3) for 2023-24. Although, these drafts have not been adopted by the European Commission, they provide potential participants with the expected themes in the work programme.
Following the draft work programme announcement, a cluster Webinar Series has been organised by Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) and the UK's Horizon Europe National Contact Points (NCPs) to give an overview of the six Clusters under Pillar 2 'Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness'. There will be six webinars during December 2022 with further details and registration available on the UKRO website.
Timesheet updates for UKRI awards
From July 2022, there has been a new mechanism for timesheets so that we can comply with audit requirements on UKRI and Innovate funding. Since then we have gathered feedback from users and made improvements to the documentation and processes. This includes
- Updated financial posting process in CUFS (agreed with UKRI)
- Updated timesheet template
- New hours tracker for UKRI
- New SharePoint List to give visibility of timesheets waiting approval
- New declaration form template for all funders
- New change process once timesheets are submitted
The new templates and guidance can be found on the front page of the Research Grants Timesheet SharePoint Site, along with a link to the recording of the demonstration session given on 28th November.
RGUG Meeting 22nd November - recording and presentations now available
Thank you to those who were able to attend the Research Grants User Group Meeting (RGUG) on 22nd November 2022. The recording and slides are now available to view to the ROO website. The meeting included an overview of updated documents and processes for timesheets, UKRI’s Trusted Research and Innovation Principles and a Researchfish presentation for Node Administrators.
Symplectic Elements Link to Researchfish until Friday 13th January
The annual submission period for UKRI, NIHR, BHF, CRUK and other funders is 6th February to 16th March 2023 during which time PIs need to use their Researchfish account to submit a return on their research outputs. Prior to the submission period, please encourage PIs to enter their research outputs into Symplectic Elements by 13th January 2023. This is so that the bulk upload from Symplectic to Researchfish, of links from grants to research outputs can take place.
After 13th January 2023, we will not pass data to Researchfish from Symplectic Elements and any additional links, and the outputs themselves, will need to be input directly in Researchfish during the submission period.
Note that the research outputs being uploaded from Symplectic Elements to Researchfish are journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters and data sets where they have a unique identifier (DOI).
Reminder - Christmas and New Year Deadlines for Applications
Due to the Christmas vacation the Research Operations Office (ROO) will close from 5pm on Friday 23rd December 2022 and will re-open on Tuesday 3rd January 2023. Therefore, please be aware of the following deadlines and ensure that your researchers are made aware of these arrangements.
If you have applications with a funder deadline in the first week of January, the 5 working day deadline is before Christmas. For example,
| Funder deadline | Friday 6th January 2023, 5pm |
| 2 working day deadline | Wednesday 4th January 2023, 5pm |
| 5 working day deadline | Thursday 22nd December 2022, 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 us at the earliest opportunity so that we can assess the resource requirements to support the application. Full details of the deadline policy and the application deadline calculator can be found on the ROO website.