MRO Update - Process Changes for ARC Funding Opportunities

The MRO ARC team has been listening to your feedback and is pleased to advise that the following changes will be in effect from 8am Monday 28 Oct 2019:

• The MRO will create a Pure record for your Monash-led application, you don’t need to.  You will only be required to create a Pure record if you are a CI on an application led by another university.
• Use RMS to signal to the MRO that your application is ready for review, not Pure. In RMS  ‘Submit to Research Office’.  You do not have to submit the Pure record to Pre-Approval
• You will receive MRO review feedback via email.  It will concurrently be uploaded to the Pure record too, but you don’t need to retrieve it from there.
• MRO feedback issues will be labelled high, medium and low risk, to enable you to better determine the importance of corrective action.  The previous Eligibility/Compliance/Advice labels have been retired.
• There is a new Certification form, which is generic across all ARC schemes.

Generalised Certification Form
The MRO has introduced a generalised ARC Certification Form, which should be used for all MRO-led ARC proposals. This has a dedicated intranet page, found here, which includes the form itself, instructions on who needs to sign the form, an FAQ, and more.

Language & Issues Identified in MRO Reviews
How the ARC screens for eligibility issues is imperfect. And the ARC keeps their processes opaque. Moreover, we cannot know who the Assessors will be or how rigidly they'll follow the ARC's instructions. As a result, all proposals faces risks which must be managed.

To better enable researchers to manage the risks their proposals face, especially while under growing time pressure as closing dates loom, the MRO will no longer identify issues in our reviews as being Eligibility/Compliance/Advice. Instead, the MRO will identify risks—risks concerning eligibility, but also risks concerning likelihood of being scored poorly. Equipped with this feedback, researchers will be better able to understand what actions they must take to address those risks they're unwilling to wear and maximise their chances of securing funding.

A mock sample of how our feedback will now look can be found here.

PURE, RMS, & The 'Trigger' For MRO Reviews
Researchers will no longer create or update Pure records—or interact with Pure at all—for Monash-led ARC proposals.

As soon as the MRO detects a new proposal has been started in RMS, the MRO will create a Pure record and notify both the researcher and relevant Faculty Research Office (FRO) via email.

The MRO will then update these Pure records daily to ensure they list:

• Proposal ID
• Proposal title (A1)
• PCI and all other Monash CIs
• Funding Opportunity
• Submission date (the relevant ARC closing date)
• Life cycle start date (the scheme specific Commencement date)

When a proposal is ready to be reviewed by the MRO, you must "Submit to Research Office" in RMS.  This will trigger the MRO review process.  We will then push the corresponding Pure record to Pre-Approval and notify you and your FRO that we have done so, giving notification that the proposal is in our queue awaiting an MRO review. (NOTE: For FL/FT/DE proposals, you’ll need to upload you’re a placeholder for your Strategic Statement, until the signed letter has been provided, but this is the only allowed placeholder.)

When our review is complete, the MRO will email the feedback to you and your FRO. The MRO will also either return the Pure record to Draft (if revisions and another MRO review is necessary) or send it to Internal Approvals (if ready for submission to the ARC).

When a proposal has completed all MRO reviews and is ready to be sent into the Internal Approvals, all additional details from the proposal will be added to the Pure record. This includes:

• Non-Monash CIs/PIs
• Collaborative Partner Orgs
• Final ARC funding ask
• Cash/In-kind contributions from Monash and other Orgs
• Life cycle end date

The MRO will notify both the researcher and relevant FRO of this update and Pure status change via email.

The MRO will submit your RMS application to the ARC as per usual practice and by the submission deadline.

Once the funding opportunity closes in RMS, the MRO will then complete a full and final validation of the Pure records, as quickly as possible.

For all of the above steps, when contacting the 'relevant FRO', the email will be sent based on the Managing Org in the Pure record, the corresponding email address entry here. (NOTE: Because the FROs will be advised of proposals from their researchers via email, the ARC Applications in RMS Confluence page will no longer be maintained.)

Our MRO Submission Process intranet page, found here, has updated to reflect the above.

Please contact us at mro-applications@monash.edu if you have any queries about this funding opportunity.