Published on 22 November 2024
Reminder - Research Office Christmas Closure
Due to the Christmas vacation, the Research Office will close from 1pm on Tuesday 24th December 2024 and will re-open on Thursday 2nd January 2025.
Please be aware of the following deadlines and ensure that your researchers are made aware of these arrangements.
Post-award
Final Expenditure Statements due over the Christmas closure period must be confirmed to ROO by Friday 29th November 2024. This is to allow statements to be submitted to the funder, prior to the Christmas closure.
Applications
If you have applications with a funder deadline in early January, when counting back the number of working days, Monday 23rd December will be the last full “working day” before Christmas. For example -
| Funder deadline | Friday 3rd January 2025, 5pm |
| 2 working days | Monday 23rd December 2024, 5pm |
| 5 working days | Wednesday 18th December 2024, 5pm |
As a reminder, the ROO asks for a minimum of four weeks’ notice of the intention to submit to a particular scheme. Full details of the deadline policy and the application deadline calculator can be found on the ROO website.
Worktribe: crossing the finish line
The pre-award and contracts modules of Worktribe are being introduced to the two final schools before the end of this year:
- School of Arts and Humanities - Friday 22 November
- School of Clinical Medicine - Monday 2 December
All other schools and most research active institutions are now using the system to manage their grant applications and contracts. A final review will take place soon to ensure everybody else still needing some form of access to Worktribe will be appropriately onboarded.
Guidance for using Worktribe can be found on the Supporting Research at Cambridge Sharepoint site and is linked to from the Research Operations Office website.
The next phase of work will be introducing the post-award modules across the University in 2025 and we will provide updates and opportunities for involvement in the New Year.
Research Grants User Group meeting - 5th December
The next Research Grants User Group (RGUG) is scheduled for Thursday 5th December at 11:15am as a Teams meeting. On this occasion, the meeting will finish slightly earlier than usual around midday, to allow for the Researchfish Node Administrator session to take place straight afterwards.
| Thursday 5th December 2024 |
11:15am RGUG followed by 12pm Researchfish Node Administrator session |
Link to the meeting |
If you have any queries, contact Hannah.Pawson@admin.cam.ac.uk
Tailored grant application support
The Research Strategy Office provides tailored grant application support and manages two institutional funds to further enable this:
- Grant application support, tailored to the needs of the application. Support includes but is not limited to project management of bid preparation, organising internal peer review and practice interview panels, providing non-academic perspective and review, providing support for non-academic parts of the grant application, etc. For more information, please contact researchstrategy@admin.cam.ac.uk
- Large Grant Contributions Fund provides financial contributions for large collaborative grants, for applications led by Cambridge as well as the partner grants where Cambridge is a major partner. For more information, please visit the Fund website or contact rpc@admin.cam.ac.uk
- The University’s Bid Preparation Fund provides awards of up to around £10k for development of large collaborative research grant applications. For advice about a prospective application to the Fund, please contact researchstrategy@admin.cam.ac.uk
Elements upgrade: system downtime 5th - 9th December
Elements will be unavailable from Thursday 5th December until Monday 9th December while it is upgraded to its latest version. It will not be possible to make open access, research data or doctoral theses deposits via Elements into the University repository Apollo until the upgrade has been completed. Access to view Apollo will be available as usual.
What's new
This upgrade will mostly make improvements in the background, so you should notice little change. But you may see a few improvements in your experience of using Elements including:
- Ability to download larger reports
- Option to remove your title from your displayed name
If you have any questions or comments, please contact researchinformation@admin.cam.ac.uk
Help enhance the University’s new business data strategy
Are you a member of professional services staff? Do you interact with data used to support our operations, teaching and research in your role?
The University Data Office has created a new business data strategy which sets out how the University will manage business data over the next five years. It aims to help build trust in the data we already have, increase staff confidence when using data and enable better use of data in decision making. The strategy was developed after wide consultation with data users and managers across the University.
You are invited to review the draft strategy and submit your feedback by Friday 6th December 2024. Owen Roberson, University Data Lead, is running a series of one-hour online open sessions in November for staff to give their feedback. You can also email data@admin.cam.ac.uk or complete a short anonymous feedback form. For more information, read this story on the Data at Cambridge Sharepoint.
Planned network disruption - 10th December
Between 7:30am and 9:00am on Tuesday 10th December 2024, UIS are updating the equipment that provides the University’s connection to the internet. It is anticipated that there will be some disruption to network services including Research Systems, so you should plan to avoid critical work during the morning of 10th December.
UKRI stakeholder perception survey 2024
UKRI are asking for feedback from stakeholders about the work that UKRI does. The survey is being conducted by IFF Research Ltd, an independent research agency, and all responses are anonymous.
It will take approximately 10 minutes to complete and is optimised for mobile and desktop devices. The survey will be available until 19th December 2024. To complete the survey, please go to UKRI’s website.