TY - JOUR
T1 - Robotic Bureaucracy and Administrative Burden
T2 - What Are the Effects of Universities’ Computer Automated Research Grants Management Systems?
AU - Bozeman, Barry
AU - Youtie, Jan
AU - Jung, Jiwon
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was undertaken at Arizona State University and Georgia Tech with support of the National Science Foundation under NSF EAGER Award #: 1745825. The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the United States National Science Foundation's Science of Science and Innovation Policy program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Funding Information:
One of the best-known studies of researchers’ administrative responsibilities is the Federal Demonstration Partnership Study of more than 6,000 U.S. researchers, chiefly academic researchers (Decker et al., 2007). A noteworthy and relevant finding of the study is that researchers who received federal research grants spend 42% of their time on administrative activities, both pre- and post- award, required by the grants. Time consuming activities included equipment purchases, hiring and training personnel, financial reporting, progress reports, Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols, and ensuring certifications. Like most studies of university administrative burden, the data were based on self-reports and, of course, self-reports of administrative burden and red tape do not always correspond to objective measures (Pandey and Marlowe, 2015).The study focuses on emails from two funded United States National Science Foundationresearch projects. These are: Credibility and Use of Scientific and Technical Information in Science Policy Making: An Analysis of the Information Bases of the National Research Council's Committee Reports, NSF Award Number:1262251; and EAGER: Administrative Burden in University Research Administration, NSF Award Number:1745825. We use these two projects because they involve Bozeman and Youtie as PI/Co-PI, they involve two state universities, and, because we are intimately familiar with these projects since they only recently concluded. Once having decided on the project focus, we turned to the question of just how to sort the relevant emails from the tens of thousands of other business and personal emails we received during the study period (which is coterminous with the grants periods).The data for Georgia Tech includes 60 robotic and nonrobotic emails associated with the administration of the United States National Science Foundation grant entitled EAGER: Administrative Burden in University Research Administration, NSF Award Number:1745825, all of them at some point populating the Georgia Tech email server and most of them either directed to the co-author and co-PI, Youtie. These 60 emails were sent from February 9, 2017 to December 20, 2017 to or from the co-PI of this NSF grant at the subaward institution, Georgia Tech. The subaward was rather small in size (just over $20,000), so it only involves the co-PI and no other research investigators at Georgia Tech. The 60 emails represent the startup of the project in the July-to-December 2017 time frame; all the emails except two sent in relation to the proposal phase occurred during the six-month window. The authors are grateful to Dr. Craig Boardman who performed most of the semi-structured interviews analyzed here. This research was undertaken at Arizona State University and Georgia Tech with support of the National Science Foundation under NSF EAGER Award #: 1745825. The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the United States National Science Foundation's Science of Science and Innovation Policy program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Funding Information:
The data for Georgia Tech includes 60 robotic and nonrobotic emails associated with the administration of the United States National Science Foundation grant entitled EAGER: Administrative Burden in University Research Administration, NSF Award Number:1745825, all of them at some point populating the Georgia Tech email server and most of them either directed to the co-author and co- PI , Youtie. These 60 emails were sent from February 9, 2017 to December 20, 2017 to or from the co-PI of this NSF grant at the subaward institution, Georgia Tech. The subaward was rather small in size (just over $20,000), so it only involves the co-PI and no other research investigators at Georgia Tech. The 60 emails represent the startup of the project in the July-to-December 2017 time frame; all the emails except two sent in relation to the proposal phase occurred during the six-month window.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2020/7
Y1 - 2020/7
N2 - Our paper seeks to understand effects of computerized approaches to university research grants and contracts management, especially impacts on administrative burden. Ours is a multi-method paper, including interviews with academic researchers but focuses chiefly on participant-observer research, using hundreds of our own emails from two projects located at two different universities. We find that robotic emails have complex effects and that their utility pertains to researchers' familiarity with the systems and compliance requirements, the clarity of administrative requests, the extent and location of staff support, and the interaction of personal work habits with system requirements. We provide suggestions for improving automated research administration.
AB - Our paper seeks to understand effects of computerized approaches to university research grants and contracts management, especially impacts on administrative burden. Ours is a multi-method paper, including interviews with academic researchers but focuses chiefly on participant-observer research, using hundreds of our own emails from two projects located at two different universities. We find that robotic emails have complex effects and that their utility pertains to researchers' familiarity with the systems and compliance requirements, the clarity of administrative requests, the extent and location of staff support, and the interaction of personal work habits with system requirements. We provide suggestions for improving automated research administration.
KW - Administrative burden
KW - Automated systems
KW - Research administration
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85083887325&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85083887325&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.respol.2020.103980
DO - 10.1016/j.respol.2020.103980
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85083887325
SN - 0048-7333
VL - 49
JO - Research Policy
JF - Research Policy
IS - 6
M1 - 103980
ER -