CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: research administration training

  • FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute 2026: A Career Pathway for Research-Support Staff

    The FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) is an annual week-long summer training programme, co-hosted by FORCE11 and the UCLA Library, that teaches researchers, librarians, publishers, funders, and research administrators the practical skills of open scholarly communication. For research-support professionals specifically, FSCI functions less like a one-off conference and more like a structured training pathway: a recognised route to build open-science, data-stewardship, and research-metrics competence that can be cited on a CV or used to justify a promotion case. FSCI 2026 runs 27–31 July 2026.

    The FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute is best defined this way: it is a volunteer-run, multi-day summer school in which attendees select one week-long “morning course” plus a rotation of shorter afternoon electives covering topics such as FAIR data stewardship, persistent identifiers, peer review, and research metrics. It was first launched in 2017 and is modelled on the longer-running Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, British Columbia.

    What is the FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute?

    FSCI is the training arm of FORCE11, the community that originated in 2011 around “the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship.” Since 2017, FSCI has been co-organised with the UCLA Library and runs each summer, alternating in recent years between in-person, online, and hybrid formats. Course materials from FSCI 2020 through FSCI 2024 have been archived openly on Zenodo and the Open Science Framework, so the institute leaves a durable, citable training record rather than a one-time event.

    FORCE11’s broader track record matters for credibility: the same community co-developed the FAIR Data Principles and the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, two frameworks that underpin research-data policy at funders and repositories worldwide. FSCI teaches practitioners to apply that same body of work operationally, rather than simply reading about it.

    Who should attend FSCI as a career-development step?

    FSCI is explicitly multi-audience: researchers, librarians, publishers, funders, university research-administration staff, students, and postdocs all attend the same institute, choosing courses at introductory or advanced level. For a research-support professional — someone working in a research office, library scholarly-communication unit, or funder programme team — this cross-sector mix is the point.

    Rather than training in isolation with only colleagues from one institution, attendees benchmark their skills against a global peer group. A 2018 Serials Review analysis of the institute (Rodriguez, 2018, DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2018.1555510) described FSCI as training people “not for where we’re at, but for where we’re going” — a framing that positions the institute as anticipatory skills-building rather than remedial catch-up.

    • Research administrators managing open-access compliance or data-management-plan review
    • Library staff moving into or already working in scholarly-communication roles
    • Early-career researchers who want to specialise in research infrastructure rather than bench/field research
    • Funder programme officers who need to understand practitioner-level workflows, not just policy text
    • Publishing and repository staff building peer-review, persistent-identifier, or metrics expertise

    How does the FSCI course structure work?

    Each attendee commits to one week-long morning course, which allows sustained, cohort-based depth on a single subject, and supplements it with shorter afternoon elective courses on adjacent topics. This structure is designed to produce both a depth credential (the morning course) and breadth exposure (the electives), which is unusual among short-format professional development options in the research-support field.

    Topics have included FAIR data management and stewardship, persistent identifiers, peer-review innovation, new forms of publication, research-metrics literacy, and — in recent years — AI governance in scholarly communication. Plenary sessions, “do-a-thons,” and structured networking events run alongside the coursework, which is what distinguishes FSCI from a standard webinar series.

    What does FSCI cost, and are scholarships available?

    FSCI publishes its registration fees and scholarship terms on the official FORCE11 site ahead of each year’s institute, and pricing has varied by year and by in-person/online format. FORCE11 has consistently run a scholarship programme to support attendance from historically underrepresented regions; organisers have reported scholarship recipients from six continents, including documented career-changing participation from institutions in Nigeria and Pakistan. For a research-support professional building a career-development business case, the scholarship route is often the most persuasive argument to an institution reluctant to fund a full-fee place.

    Attribute FSCI (FORCE11) Formal scholarly communication librarian role
    Format One-week intensive summer institute Ongoing salaried position
    Entry route Open registration; no degree prerequisite Typically requires an MLIS or equivalent
    Cost to individual Course fee, offset by scholarships N/A — paid employment
    Output Practical skills, network, open course materials Institutional job title and remit
    Best used as A training pathway feeding into or alongside a role The destination role itself

    How does FSCI differ from a formal scholarly communication librarian role?

    It is worth being precise about the distinction, because the two are often conflated in search results. A scholarly communication librarian is a formal, usually MLIS-qualified, salaried institutional role with responsibilities such as running an institutional repository, advising on copyright and open-access policy, or managing an “office of scholarly communication.” FSCI is not that role — it is a training pathway that can be undertaken by someone already in such a role, by someone aspiring to move into one, or by a research administrator, funder officer, or publisher who never intends to hold that job title at all.

    This distinction matters for career planning. Treating FSCI as a credential-building input — alongside, not instead of, formal qualifications, ORCID-linked professional profiles, and institutional experience — is the more accurate way to use it. Institutions considering whether to fund staff attendance should therefore evaluate FSCI as continuing professional development, comparable to funding attendance at ARMA, NCURA, or EARMA training events, rather than as a substitute for a formal library or research-office qualification.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is FSCI 2026 and when does it take place?

    FSCI 2026 is the annual FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute, running 27–31 July 2026. It follows the institute’s established format of a week-long morning course paired with rotating afternoon electives on open-science and research-communication topics for a global, cross-sector audience.

    How much does FORCE11 FSCI cost to attend?

    Registration fees are set and published by FORCE11 for each year’s institute and vary by format and early registration. FORCE11 runs a dedicated scholarship programme that has supported attendees from underrepresented countries and regions, which materially lowers the effective cost for many participants.

    Who should attend the FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute?

    FSCI is designed for researchers, librarians, publishers, funders, and research administrators at any career stage, plus students and postdocs. Courses are offered at introductory and advanced levels, so attendees choose a track matched to their existing scholarly-communication knowledge.

    Are FSCI course materials available after the event?

    Yes. FORCE11 has archived FSCI course materials from 2020 through 2024 openly on Zenodo and the Open Science Framework, meaning the training content remains accessible as a reference resource even for people who did not attend that year’s live sessions.

    What this means for research-support careers

    For institutions, FSCI attendance is a low-cost, high-signal way to build in-house open-science capacity without hiring a new specialist role. For individuals, it is a documented, citable training credential that sits alongside — not in place of — formal qualifications and institutional experience. As open-access mandates, data-management requirements, and AI-governance expectations continue to expand across funders including UKRI and cOAlition S signatories, the practical skills FSCI teaches are becoming a standard expectation of research-support work rather than a specialist add-on.

    Research offices, libraries, and funder teams weighing professional-development budgets in 2026 should treat FSCI as one input in a broader research-support career pathway: a way to keep staff current with FAIR data practice, persistent identifiers, and evolving scholarly-communication standards, while formal qualifications and institutional experience continue to do the work of defining the job itself.

  • NIH’s March 2026 Grants Policy Statement: What Every Institution’s Research Office Needs to Do Now

    The National Institutes of Health has issued a March 2026 revision to the NIH Grants Policy Statement (NOT-OD-26-057), and research offices outside the United States are not exempt from its reach. Any UK or international institution holding a subaward, consortium agreement, or direct NIH grant now has a compliance clock running: the most consequential change — a new prior-approval requirement for subawards — takes effect from 1 June 2026.

    For research administrators, this is not a routine annual refresh. The revised NIH grants policy statement 2026 tightens subrecipient monitoring, reinforces the NIH Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy, and, less visibly but just as significantly, hardens expectations around how contributor roles are documented on funded outputs. Institutions that treat this as a US-only administrative update will find themselves scrambling when their next competing renewal or Just-in-Time submission is flagged for missing subaward documentation.

    This explainer sets out what changed, why it matters for research grant administration beyond NIH’s own borders, and the concrete steps a research office should be taking this quarter.

    What NOT-OD-26-057 Actually Changes

    The headline change in the March 2026 NIH Grants Policy Statement revision is the introduction of a prior-approval step before a recipient institution may issue certain subawards under active NIH grants. Historically, subaward issuance sat largely within a recipient’s own delegated authority once the parent award was in hand, subject to standard federal subrecipient monitoring obligations under 2 CFR 200 (the Uniform Guidance). From 1 June 2026, awardee institutions must obtain NIH sign-off before finalising subawards that meet the thresholds specified in the revised policy — a shift that mirrors the agency’s broader push, visible across recent Notices, to get earlier visibility into where federal research funds ultimately flow.

    For UK universities and research institutes that sit downstream as subrecipients on US-led NIH awards, this changes the practical timeline of collaboration. A subaward that might previously have been executed within weeks of a parent award’s Notice of Award could now be delayed pending NIH’s prior-approval review. Research offices coordinating multi-country consortia — a common pattern in genomics, infectious disease, and clinical trials networks — need to build this lag into project start dates and budget-period planning, and should flag it explicitly to principal investigators who are used to faster subaward turnaround.

    Data Management and Sharing: Convergence, Not a New Burden

    The revised Grants Policy Statement does not introduce a new data-sharing regime; instead, it folds the existing NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy more tightly into the core policy document, making DMS plan compliance an explicit, cross-referenced condition of award rather than a companion policy institutions could treat as separate. In practice, this means DMS plans are now read alongside the Grants Policy Statement’s subaward and reporting provisions as a single compliance package, which raises the stakes for institutions whose data plans have been thin or templated.

    The same logic applies to the NIH open access policy lineage — the NIH Public Access Policy that governs deposit of peer-reviewed manuscripts arising from NIH funding. The 2026 revision continues to align expectations around timely deposit, persistent identifiers, and machine-readable metadata with the broader global shift toward open science, echoed in UKRI’s own open access policy and the cOAlition S Plan S principles. Institutions with NIH-funded outputs should treat manuscript deposit compliance and DMS plan fidelity as two halves of the same reporting obligation, not separate boxes to tick.

    Contributor Roles and the Attribution Layer

    A quieter but structurally important element of the revised policy is its reinforcement of contributor-role transparency in reporting and progress reports involving multiple investigators and subrecipient teams. Where an award spans several institutions, NIH’s expectation is that reporting clearly distinguishes who did what — an expectation that maps naturally onto the contributor role taxonomy first published as CRediT.

    CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and its fourteen roles — from Conceptualization and Methodology through to Writing – Original Draft and Writing – Review & Editing — give research offices a ready-made, internationally recognised vocabulary for exactly the kind of multi-institution attribution NIH’s revised reporting language is asking for. Institutions that already require CRediT statements on manuscripts arising from grant-funded work, and that track contributor roles at the ORCID-linked researcher level, will find it far easier to produce the kind of granular reporting the 2026 policy anticipates than those relying on ad hoc author-order conventions.

    This is a useful moment for research offices to check whether their internal reporting templates for multi-site NIH awards actually capture contributor roles in a structured way, or whether that information exists only informally between collaborating PIs.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    The combined effect of the subaward prior-approval rule, the tighter DMS/open-access linkage, and the contributor-attribution expectations is a policy environment that rewards institutions with mature research administration policy 2026 infrastructure and penalises those still managing NIH compliance manually. Concretely, research offices should:

    • Map every active and pipeline NIH subaward against the new prior-approval thresholds, and rebuild subaward issuance timelines to account for the review step from 1 June 2026.
    • Audit existing DMS plans against the revised Grants Policy Statement language, not just the standalone DMS Policy text, to close any gaps in how the two are cross-referenced.
    • Confirm that manuscript deposit workflows tied to the NIH Public Access Policy are functioning ahead of any competing renewal or annual progress report.
    • Introduce or reinforce CRediT-based contributor statements in multi-institution reporting, using ORCID identifiers to anchor role attribution at the individual level.
    • Brief PIs directly — subaward delays and reporting changes affect project planning, not just the compliance office, and PIs are often the last to hear about policy notices like NOT-OD-26-057.

    Bodies such as NCURA, EARMA, and ARMA have all flagged the growing complexity of cross-border federal compliance as a priority area, and institutions should look to these networks — alongside INORMS — for shared templates and peer benchmarking rather than building compliance responses in isolation. Investment in structured research administration training on the revised Grants Policy Statement, delivered before the June deadline, will do more to prevent downstream delays than any last-minute scramble once subawards start stalling in review.

    Looking Ahead

    NIH’s March 2026 revision is best read as part of a broader convergence: funder policies, open science mandates, and structured attribution standards are increasingly expected to interlock rather than operate as parallel compliance streams. Research offices that align their subaward management, data-sharing infrastructure, and contributor-role reporting now — rather than treating each as a separate policy silo — will be far better placed not only for this revision, but for the funder policy changes that are likely to follow it as NIH, UKRI, and other major funders continue to tighten the links between funding, data stewardship, and verifiable attribution of research contributions.