News
We are pleased to be able to announce that our annual conference will take place on Tuesday 12th and Wednesday 13th June 2012 in the De Vere Grand Harbour hotel in Southampton. The ‘Fundamentals of Research Administration' training event, the Executive Forum, and the Expert Seminar will be held on Monday 11th June. Please put these dates in your diary. For the second year running, we will be holding our conference back to back with PraxisUnico - PraxisUnico's annual conference will take place in the same venue on 14th and 15th June. Some members may remember the conference held at the De Vere Grand Harbour in 2007, which was a great success. We hope to put on an even better conference in 2012, with your support and involvement. More details will follow in due course.'
Dates for your diaries!
CERIF in Practice: 7th December, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Annual Conference, Southampton, 12-13 June (with pre-conference events on 11 June)
To be included on the waiting lists click here.
8 August 2011
Download the latest Members Newsletter here:
E-Newsletter Edition 21 (Summer 2011)
25 July 2011
Forthcoming courses, Praxis Unico:
Research Contracts
15-18 November 2011, Loughborough
Annual Conference
14-15 June 2012, Southampton
Click here for full details
ESRC Centres and Large Grants Competition 2011/12
The first callf or outline proposals for the newly integrated Centres and Large Grant Competition was anounced recently for applications ranging from £2 million to £5 million at 100% full economic cost.
19 July 2011
Click here to download ARMA's response to the ESRC consultation on demand management.
16 June 2011
ARMA - the first 20 years
The history of the first 20 years of the Association charts our evolution from a small self-help group to a recognised professinal association. Click here to download the publication. A short resumé, including a timeline, is also available.
5 June 2011
ARHC Joint Study Tour, 20th May 2011
Presentations are now available to download from the AHRC Study Tour page.
Do you know your publishing rights?
Recently, some publishers have sought to negotiate directly with universities and research institutes on the terms and conditions under which their authors can deposit manuscripts of their own papers into repositories. ARMA is a member of The Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) which seeks to ensure the widest possible dissemination of UK research outputs. The OAIG therefore wish to state our concern with publishers who seek to limit access by imposing unacceptable embargo periods on the deposit of authors' manuscripts in local, institutional or subject-based repositories.
Authors should retain their right to deposit their own manuscripts, and this right should not be dependent on the later agreements to publish agreed with publishers. In particular, publishers should not seek to supersede any agreement between authors and their funders or institutions. These funders and institutions wish to see wide dissemination, with no artificial delays or embargos.
Furthermore, where collective arrangements for licensing exist that can already cover these issues (such as in the UK with clauses in the JISC Collections Model Licence), then such direct negotiation with individual universities is doubly unhelpful and risks undermining those collective arrangements.
The Open Access Implementation Group calls on universities not to enter into one-to-one negotiations with publishers on self-archiving rights for their staff, and instead to rely on publicly declared rights as shown on the Sherpa-RoMEO website.
The OAIG membership includes:
Guild HE, Universities UK, UCL, Wellcome Trust, The University of
Salford, The University of Edinburgh, SCONUL, Research Libraries UK,
Research Councils UK, Public Library of Science, JISC, Association of
Research Managers and Administrators.
Find out more about the work of the OAIG at http://open-access.org.uk/
25 March 2011
ESRC launched their new website on 27th January. The site has been designed to deliver a more cost-efficient and user-focused service and has been improved in response to feedback from staff, visitors and the academic community. The search and navigation have been enhanced and the uploading process for research outputs. "Research Catalogue" is the new title for the Awards and Outputs Database. the catalogue provides a simplified tool for accessing ESRC research data. The website will no longer be called 'ESRC society today' and their old website address (www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk) will only redirect to the new website for a limited period before becoming inactive.
28 January 2011
ARMA Board Elections 2011: Declaration of result was made on 15th March.
15 March 2011
Important Information for AHRC Applicants
In March the AHRC will be moving to a new cross-Council grants processing system as part of completing its transition to the RCUK Shared Services Centre. this is part of a process leading to all Research Councils receiving and processing their grant applications through a common system. Harmonisation of common processes will allow for greater consistency across the RCs and result in efficiency savings which will be channelled into further investment in research. However, due to the technical complexity of these changes, the AHRC need a short period when normal application processes are suspended to ensure that migration of systems can take place quickly and efficiently and overall disruption be kept to the minimum. Applicants will therefore not be able to submit grant proposals through Je-S from 4 p.m. on 28th January, with calls re-opening on 1 March. During this period they will however be able to access the Je-S system, create proposals and complete some sections of the form, although some sections will be unavailable. In addition there may be some delay in processing applications after 1 March while transferring to the new system. Any post award amendment requests received after 28 January will be held until after 1 April. Deadlines for issuing and returning final reports and final expenditure statements which are due between 1 February and 31 March may also be extended. Research managers and administrtors are requested to cascade this information to colleagues where appropriate and applicants are advised to ensure they check the Je-S and AHRC websites for further information. If you wish to discuss any issues you might have about these changes, please contact Philip Pothen p.pothen@ahrc.ac.uk
7 January 2011
RCUK has provided a statement on its position on full cost reporting, which can be found here
1 December 2010
Professional Development Framework
Thanks to those of you who completed the electronic survey to let us know what you want out of the Professional Development Framework. Thirty eight people took part in the survey. Your top three priorities for the Framework are as follows:
- it should help to raise the profile of research administration as a profession
- it should engage senior members as well as junior colleagues
- it should lead to an increased training and development provision from ARMA and (tied in third place) it should unify the training and development provision of all relevant providers
Some of you commented that:
- employers must see a clear benefit to them as an individual progresses on the PDF
- the Framework should take account of the different routes by which people become research managers and administrators
- ARMA should consider online training and local provision, to keep costs down
These are important issues and will be given careful consideration during the development of the Framework.
You may be interested to know that ARMA has been selected as one of the initial projects to pilot the AUA CPD Framework. We will be working closely with the AUA Consultant over the next few months to explore how the nine Professional Behaviours identified in the CPD Framework can be integrated into the ARMA Professional Development Framework. I will bring you further news of this project as it develops.
For the next few weeks I will continue to run Focus Groups at various universities around the UK to collect further information about the knowledge and skills that research adminsitrators and managers need in order to undertake their various roles. I will be running Focus Groups at the Bloomsbury College, Coventry University, Leicester/Loughborough, Edinburgh-based institutions and Bangor University, in addition to those already run at Manchester, Keele and universities in the North East. I will reflect findings back to you as they emerge.
Marie Garnett, Professional Development Manager, ARMA
1 December 2010
New Concordat prioritises public engagement with research
Some of the UK`s leading research funders have announced a new agreement to help embed public engagement with research across all disciplines in the higher education and research sectors.
The Concordat for Engaging the Public with Research was launched on 7th December by Research Councils UK following agreement with several funding bodies, including the Wellcome Trust.
"In an increasingly technological world everyone needs to understand the benefits and potential concerns around new developments, which may affect us all," said David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science.
"Science engagement can help the public become part of a national conversation on some of the big issues like climate change and renewable energy, ensuring that researchers and policy makers understand the impact of leading research."
7 December 2010
New guidance from the UK Research Integrity Office
UKRIO information note to raise awareness of criteria for retractions in academic journals. Please address any queries to: admin@ukrio.org
October 2010
Call for sector to unite behind Open Access
Ten leading organisations from HE and the research sector have joined forces to drive the implementation of open access in the UK. Click here to read Press Release.
