Before you can submit a grant proposal…
to the EPSRC or other funding body, in addition to completing the funder’s application forms and supporting documentation, you are required to complete various University forms and procedures. Below is a quick guide.
Note especially the need to have your proposal read by someone outside the project team prior to submission. This is required both for approval of ethical considerations and for departmental approval of the proposal.
- The Head of Department needs to approve your proposal before you can submit it. The departmental research grants and contracts form is used to ensure that you have considered all the resources the department will need to provide, and that you have taken your proposal through the internal peer review system. Complete this form so that the HoD knows he should sign the RS1 (see below).
- The Research Development and Support Office (RDSO) requires completion of form RS1. For anything other than small travel-only or equipment-only grants, you will need to attach the summary information from the pFact costing tool to this form. The RS1 is available from the RDSO web pages.
- If the funding body is one that could pay Full Economic Cost, but in this case is not going to (normally this means an industrial source)not a Research Council and will not provide the full economic cost of the project, you also need to complete the Dean’s Checklist form, also on the RDSO web pages.
- The EIRA1 form, Ethical Implications of Research Activity, should also be completed. Note that this requires a signature from someone outside your project who has read the proposal. You can find out more about this on the RDSO’s ethics pages, the University ethics pages, and Leon Watts’s research ethics page.
This information does not replace the guidance from the Research Support and Funding section of the Research Development and Support Office.
What to do with the forms
When the forms are all complete, you should:
- Deliver the RS1 and a copy of the EIRA1 to the Research Support and Funding team
- Give the original EIRA1 form to the Department Ethics Officer, Leon Watts, together with enough detail of the grant proposal that he can tell what it is about and see how any ethical issues have been addressed
- Retain the departmental form and a copy of the RS1 in case there are questions later!
Other useful documents
- How to write a good justification of resources: advice from EPSRC.
- RDSO Best Practice page, including Top Ten Tips for bid preparation.