Archived 2016 FAQ
This was the FAQ for ROSES-2016. For the current FAQs on the current ROSES see http://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/faqs/
What's new In ROSES 2016? How does it differ from prior ROSES?
The big change for ROSES-2016 is in how you present salaries and indirect costs in your proposal. Three parts of your proposal will be affected!
First, the NSPIRES cover pages. All costs, including salaries and overhead of NASA civil servants, must now be included in the web cover page budget. This is different because, in recent years, NASA civil servant costs were not included on the cover pages. If your institution is not a NASA center, this means your NASA Co-Investigators must provide you with their full and total costs so that they may be included in your budget. (The funds to NASA centers will still be sent directly from NASA, and not sent as a subaward). Note that reviewers will not be able to see the salary and overhead numbers that you enter in the NSPIRES cover pages, but program officers will. You will too if you look at the proposal after submission. Don’t freak out, you are not seeing the redacted version for the reviewers, you are seeing the program officer’s version.
Second The budget section of the main proposal document. This section is the detailed budget and its justification that you prepare for reviewers. The change this year is that no salaries or benefits for any participant or overhead for any organization should be listed or mentioned in the budget section, or for that matter, anywhere else in the main body of the proposal. You should only tabulate the direct costs of your proposal, excluding salary and benefits. Budgets for all subawards or NASA centers presented in the main proposal document should be treated the same way as the budget for your own institution, I.e., do not list or mention salary, benefits, or overhead. The budget justification in the proposal should document and rationalize all costs other than salary/benefits and overhead costs. Proposals submitted in response to this ROSES NRA must include the Summary of Work effort (see Table 1) which, along with any rationale of the time provided in the budget justification, will allow peer reviewers to evaluate whether the level of effort is appropriate. See Section IV (b) iii of ROSES-2016. The proposed time of the participants, not the costs of the time, will be seen by peer reviewers. Peer reviewers will still see and evaluate the costs of things other than time and overhead.
Third, you will upload a new, separately uploaded "total budget" PDF with a full budget consistent with the numbers you entered in the NSPIRES cover pages and,, if needed, providing greater detail. This "total budget" includes everything, salary, fringe, benefits for all participants and overhead from all types of organizations, including NASA civil servants. It should contain any needed justification for the salary and overhead and overhead rates, but should not repeat the justifications for direct costs that you put in the main body of the proposal. This "total budget” PDF document will not be shown to reviewers.
For more information including screen captures and details on how to handle sub awards and Co-Is at government labs see http://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/how-to-guide/nspires-CSlabor/.
In addition, a number of other changes have been made including:
Changes have been made to how information about requested High-End Computing resources will be collected (on the NSPIRES cover pages and as a separate, uploaded PDF document, see Section I (d) of the ROSES-2016 Summary of Solicitation). Text describing the new process for proposed computational projects submitted through ROSES as well as a link to download the template are now live on http://www.hec.nasa.gov/request/science_call.html. Questions on allocation requests should be directed to support@hec.nasa.gov.
Rules regarding CVs and Current and Pending Support have been somewhat relaxed
Data Management Plans (DMPs) are still required for most proposals and to Astrophysics, Earth Science and Heliophysics (Appendices A, B & D of ROSES) last year's instructions still apply, a brief statement will be collected on the cover page, see our DMP FAQ at http://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/faqs/dmp-faq-roses/ However, proposers to Planetary Science (all of Appendix C and E.4) must provide data management plan as part of the proposal PDF, see Section 3.5.1.of C.1 and read the program elements carefully. Some, such as PDART C.7, evaluate it as part of merit and have different requirements.
The restrictions involving China persist, please see http://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/faqs/prc-faq-roses/
See Section I(c) of the ROSES-2016 summary of Solicitation for a complete list of the changes to ROSES this year.
If you are looking for the FAQ from last year you may view the archived 2015 FAQ at http://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/faqs/archived-2015-faq/
