Justification for change

JUSTIFICATION FOR CHANGE

OMB CONTROL NO. 0648-0362
Sea Grant Program Application Requirements for Grants, for Sea Grant Fellowships and for Designation as a Sea Grant College or Regional Consortium

This request to simplify the NOAA 90-2 project summary form and make it more compatible with the way we and our institutional grant applicants now manage project information electronically. We would like to create a new form, NOAA90-2A, and to continue to use the current fillable printable form, to allow applicants to use it if their information management systems are not yet ready to use the 90-2A form. Both forms will be uploaded through Grants Online, but after submission, when we process the new version, we can feed the information directly into our database instead of having to read it off the form and type it in manually. On both forms, we will have the same questions.

Changes to content:

Remove* the following fields:

1a. ICODE

4. Revision Date

5. Project Status

6. Initiation Date

7. Completion Date

8. Subprogram

9b. Effort (of the principal investigator, in man-months)

9c. Affiliation code (of the principal investigator (PI))

10b, 11b, 12b. Effort (of the other investigators)

10c, 11c, 12c. Affiliation Codes (of the other investigators)

15, 16, 18. Last year’s funding for this project, in three funding categories

19. Related projects

20. Parent projects

*Note: places for some of these fields are included on the 90-2A form, for compatibility with the 90-2 and to allow applicants to use them for their own purposes if they wish, but it will be made clear that we do not collect or track this information, and applicants are under no obligation to provide it.

Change the following fields:

13. Replace the fields “Sea Grant Funds” and "Pass Through Funds" (two types of Federal funding) with a single field, "Federal Funding Request". Applicants will no longer have to identify the type of federals funds they are requesting.

14. Change name of “State Matching Funds” to “Match” to make it clear that applicants do not have to distinguish between state funds and matching funds from other sources.

21. Change name of “Sea Grant Strategic Plan Classification” to “Classification Codes” to correspond with the nomenclature actually in use by our office and applicants.

Add the following three new fields:

PROGRAM FOCUS AREAS. All Sea Grant programs organize their projects according to focus areas in their strategic plans. In the past, this information could usually be gleaned from the Objectives of the project. This new field standardizes how they tell us what part of their plan each project is supporting.

PARTNERS. Working with partners is an important part of Sea Grant’s mission, and Programs frequently tell us who they are working with on a project. In the past, this information could sometimes be found in the Methodology of the project. This new field standardizes how they can tell us about these partners.

DATA SHARING PLAN. By a new NOAA Directive, starting this year all research grant proposals need to include a Data Sharing Plan, so this field would be the place to provide a copy of the plan, or summarizing in a few sentences and providing information for accessing the complete plan. The Data Sharing Plan is a brand new requirement that could possibly be as short as a sentence – the point of contact who is keeping the data and will send it to people who ask for it. It could be significantly longer if their plan is more complicated, but the NOAA directive puts a 2-page maximum on the plan.

To clarify: The actual burden for the plan is covered under the standard grant application forms, and is not being added here; only a copy or summary is requested as part of the summary form burden.

We estimate the time needed for the 3 new questions, minus the time saved by the other changes, will result in a burden about the same as it is now: 20 minutes.