Researcher Profile Optimization Study (RPOS)

An in-progress Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) initiative, run under FDP's Open Government: Research Administration Data (OG:RAD) subcommittee, that surveys researchers and research-administration offices across FDP's member institutions to document how federally required researcher profile information -- biosketches, current & pending support, and collaborator disclosures -- is captured across agencies and platforms, and to recommend changes that reduce duplicate data entry and support interoperability, research security, and compliance.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 16 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A research-administration office at an FDP member institution completes the RPOS survey, describing how it currently reassembles the same investigator's biosketch, current & pending support disclosure, and collaborator list separately for an NIH SciENcv submission and an NSF Research.gov submission because the two agency platforms don't share the underlying profile data.

Is an instance

A faculty investigator who has submitted proposals to both NIH and NSF responds to RPOS's researcher-facing survey about how many times they've had to re-enter the same biographical, appointment, and funding-history information across different federal portals.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A single institution's internal review of its own biosketch template, done independently of FDP and OG:RAD, is not RPOS -- it isn't part of FDP's cross-institutional survey and evidence base.

Not an instance

OG:RAD's separate work analyzing HERD Survey data or gathering feedback on the standardized Notice of Award (SNoA) is a distinct effort within the same FDP subcommittee, not RPOS itself.

The Researcher Profile Optimization Study (RPOS) is a live, in-progress initiative of the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) — the consortium of more than 230 U.S. academic institutions and 10 federal funding agencies that develops consensus-based solutions to reduce research-administration burden. RPOS runs as a work group under FDP’s Open Government: Research Administration Data (OG:RAD) subcommittee, within FDP’s Research Administration Committee.

FDP frames the problem RPOS addresses in scale terms: more than 95,000 new federal research proposals are submitted to NIH and NSF each year, and the researcher-profile information those proposals require — biosketches (including the NIH-style biosketch), current and pending support disclosures, and collaborator disclosures among them — varies by agency and by platform, creating duplicate work for both researchers and administrators. RPOS is surveying researchers and the research-administration staff who support them to document how this information is actually assembled today, then to recommend changes that reduce duplicate data entry, improve interoperability across the systems institutions use to manage research information, and support federal research-security and compliance requirements.

For CASRAI’s audience, RPOS sits directly upstream of the identifier crosswalk problem this Dictionary already documents: a researcher’s profile — name variants, affiliations, funding history, prior support — is exactly the data that a working ORCID iD-anchored crosswalk to institutional and funder systems is meant to keep consistent. See CASRAI’s guide on connecting DOI, ORCID, ROR, and institutional identifiers for the technical mechanics any RPOS recommendation would need to interoperate with, and the CRIS and identifiers cluster hub for the broader research-information-systems context.

As of mid-2026, RPOS is in an early data-gathering phase: FDP is documenting variability in federal researcher-profile data requirements and recruiting FDP-affiliated faculty and research-administration staff to complete its surveys. It has not yet published findings or a resulting standard — this entry describes the study’s scope and status, not a finished specification.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Researcher Profile Optimization Study (RPOS)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/researcher-profile-optimization-study-rpos" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/researcher-profile-optimization-study-rpos",
  "name": "Researcher Profile Optimization Study (RPOS)",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/researcher-profile-optimization-study-rpos",
  "description": "An in-progress Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) initiative, run under FDP's Open Government: Research Administration Data (OG:RAD) subcommittee, that surveys researchers and research-administration offices across FDP's member institutions to document how federally required researcher profile information -- biosketches, current & pending support, and collaborator disclosures -- is captured across agencies and platforms, and to recommend changes that reduce duplicate data entry and support interoperability, research security, and compliance.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/researcher-profile-optimization-study-rpos",
  "sameAs": [
    "RPOS",
    "FDP Researcher Profile Optimization Study"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-16T07:41:16",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}