October 3, 2011 Memo for HERD/FFRDC change

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

4201 WILSON BOULEVARD

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA 22230

October 3, 2011

TO: Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Office of Management and Budget

Docket Library

FROM: Suzanne Plimpton

Reports Clearance Officer

National Science Foundation

SUBJECT: Amendment to OMB clearance 3145-0100, “Survey of R&D Expenditures at Universities and Colleges”

Attached for your records is the electronic submission of the amendment to the OMB clearance until 10/31/13 of the following collection:

• 3145-0100, “Survey of R&D Expenditures at Universities and Colleges”

This amendment concerns the FY 2011 FFRDC R&D Survey and Higher Education R&D (HERD) Survey questionnaires. The changes requested are to add one item to the FFRDC survey and modify two items on the HERD survey. The FFRDC survey’s new item (question 2) will request the federal agency sources of the R&D expenditures for FY 2011. The purpose of requesting this information is to improve our ability to cross-check between the FFRDC-reported expenditures and the obligations reported by the federal agencies to the Survey of Federal Funds for R&D.

The HERD survey change will expand questions 7 and 8 to include more categories of pass-through or subrecipient entities in order to obtain more detail requested by data users about the types of pass-through arrangements. Because we recognize that not all institutions will be able to provide this level of detail immediately and may need to add accounting codes in order to provide the detail for future years of the survey, we have included a special notice under the instructions for each question stating if the breakout is not easy to provide, they should continue to report by the previous categories of higher education institutions and all other entities. We have also clarified instructions in a few places based on feedback received after the FY 2010 survey cycle.

Based on discussions with respondents regarding the new items, we expect a minor increase to the burden estimate due to these changes. We estimate these new questions should require an average of no more than 30 additional minutes per respondent for the FY 2011 surveys. This increase totals 424 hours of additional burden across both surveys. The new item for the FFRDC survey should already be tracked within the FFRDCs and easy to extract. The HERD questions 7 and 8 expansion is optional and should only be reported if it does not require significant additional time to manually compile from the institutional data systems. Because this increase in average burden is estimated to be under one hour, we have retained the current burden estimates listed in whole hours on the survey forms.

Please note we are continuing to collect actual burden reports from all survey respondents in order to provide OMB with a report on the one-time versus recurring burden as part of the next request for Information Collection clearance.

If you have any questions, please call me at 703-292-7556.

Form 83-C

Attachment 1: FY 2011 FFRDC R&D Survey and Higher Education R&D Survey instruments