Kuali Research Administration project launched
BLOOMINGTON, Ind -- The Kuali Foundation announces the launch of Kuali Research Administration (KRA) as its next community source software for higher education. Indiana University, in close partnership with Cornell University and the Weill College of Medicine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, and the University of Arizona, will develop the Kuali Research Administration system as a community source project like Sakai and Kuali Financials.
Funded in part by a $1.5M grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the KRA is based on MIT’s proven COEUS system, one of the first cradle-to-grave award management tools in the nation. KRA will further enhance the functionality and technical architecture for a modern research administration system.
“Colleges and universities are under increased scrutiny for their effective management of research processes and information. Lapses in oversight or controls can cost the academic treasury millions of dollars and put a university’s research enterprise at substantial risk,” said Brad Wheeler, Indiana University chief information officer and chair of the Kuali Foundation. “A comprehensive system to manage the complexities of research administration is needed, and no present system – commercial, in-house, or developed in partnership – fully addresses this need,” he said.
Charles R. Fay, vice provost for research administration at Cornell University, said, “At Cornell, we undertook an extensive assessment of the requirements for administrative systems capable of supporting a large-scale, sophisticated, and fully compliant research enterprise. We quickly determined that the system requirements were so broad, so specialized, and so unique to higher education that no commercial products could come close to meeting our needs. In the end, the decision to join our KRA colleagues in developing a research administration IT structure was a no-brainer.”
Steve Martin, associate vice president for research at Indiana University, adds, “KRA offers a rare opportunity for us to have our cake and eat it too. For research administrative systems, that means having more control over your destiny than is offered through vended systems while investing less than a go-it-alone approach demands. In addition, we benefit greatly from being able to start with a widely used and well designed product (COEUS) and move forward from there.”
KRA will update the COEUS technical architecture for vendor independence and easier integration with other administration systems and will offer expanded research administration functionality. As community source software backed by the Kuali Foundation, KRA is expected to provide essential cross-university leverage for efficient management of research endeavors – from the faculty researcher through grants administration to federal funding agencies.
“The generous grant from the Mellon Foundation combined with the intellectual capital provided by MIT within the COEUS software provides the Kuali Foundation a proven design basis for work on the best-of-breed electronic research administration tool available for the higher education community,” said Stephen Dowdy, director of electronic research administration at MIT.
The Kuali Research Administration project plans to deliver the following components and expects its first release in 2007 with the full project completed in 2008.
- KRA Core Software
- Proposal Preparation (Routing, Content, Grants.gov)
- Budget Development
- Research Administration Management
- Add on Modules
- Subcontractor Management
- Research Risks:
- Human Subjects
- Vertebrate Animals
- Financial Conflict of Interest and Commitment
- Biological Agents
- Radiation Safety
- Export Control
- Responsible Conduct in Research
- User documentation
- Technical documentation
- COEUS 4.x migration tools
Additional information is available at http://www.kuali.org/.
About the Kuali Foundation
The Kuali Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for sustaining and evolving a comprehensive suite of administrative software that meets the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions. Its members are colleges, universities, and interested organizations that share a common vision of open, modular, and distributed systems for their software requirements. The goal of Kuali is to bring the proven functionality of legacy applications to the ease and universality of online services.