For NSF centers
The report is due and the data is in forty inboxes.
SimplyScholar is built around the way NSF centers actually report. The annual project report in Research.gov, the participant list, the NSF-PAR deposit, and the site visit that arrives whether or not you have had time to prepare for it.
MRSEC, PREM, DMREF, MIP, NeuroNex, EPIIC. We have run NSF program sites for close to a decade, across three directorates.
01
The annual project report
Everything the RPPR asks for, already assembled.
Research.gov wants the same sections every year. The month goes on finding the records, which live in forty places and belong to other people.
- Participants
- Every person, their role, their months of effort, and when they joined or left. NSF now emails participants directly for their own demographic data, so what the report needs from you is an accurate roster, which is the thing that drifts between cycles.
- Products
- Publications arrive from CrossRef as they appear, matched to your researchers. Each one gets checked for the award acknowledgement, and the ones missing it get flagged while the author still remembers writing the paper. Deposit status for NSF-PAR travels with the record.
- Broader impacts
- REU and RET cohorts, K-12 activity, workshops, and public engagement, each captured on the day it happens. Merit Review Criterion 2 is the half of the report that is hardest to evidence a year later, which is why it has to be collected at the time.
- Partnerships
- Industry, academic, and international collaborators, with what each one contributed. For a PREM, the partnership is the program, so the record has to be better than a list of logos.
02
The site visit
Answerable on the day, not after it.
A reviewer asks how many students came through the REU in year three, how many went on to graduate school, and which thrust they sat in. The answer exists. Finding it in the room is the problem.
- Every number has a source
- Each figure in the report traces back to the record and the date it came from. When a panel asks where a number came from, you can show them in the room.
- Every year of the award at once
- Cohorts, publication counts, and participation tracked across the whole award, so trends over the cycle are available without rebuilding four annual reports.
- Ready for the recompete
- Renewal asks what the last award produced. A center that has been collecting all along answers it from records, in an afternoon.
03
By program
The structures are not interchangeable.
A MRSEC reports by IRG. A PREM reports on the partnership. A MIP reports on its user program. A tool that only knows about "projects" makes you fake the shape every year.
- MRSEC
- Interdisciplinary Research Groups as first-class structure, with people, publications, and seed projects attributed to the right IRG.
- PREM
- The partnership is the award. Student exchange, joint publications, and what each institution contributed, tracked with the same care as the science.
- DMREF
- Smaller teams, tighter loops, and data-sharing obligations that need the products record to be complete.
- MIP
- The user program is the deliverable. External users, their institutions, instrument time, and the publications that came out of visits nobody logged.
- NeuroNex
- Distributed teams across many institutions, with resources and tools shared out to a community wider than the award.
- EPIIC
- Capacity building measured in institutional change, which is the hardest thing on this page to evidence and the reason it gets left to the end.
Live sites you can go and look at: mrsec.org, prem-dmr.org, dmref.org, nsf-epiic.org, neuronex.org.
Bring us your last annual report.
Thirty minutes. We will show you which sections would have assembled themselves, using your own center's data. No pitch deck.