Research & Research Study

Important information for grant applicants - Coordinating grant applications and ethical clearance:

• To minimise delays and confusion when linking grant applications and ethical clearance, try where possible to keep the project titles on your grant application and the corresponding ethics application as identical or at least as similar as possible.
• If you will be applying for or have applied for internal or external funding for a project for which you need to have biosafety or ethical clearance, you should apply for clearance from the relevant committee(s) as soon as possible and ideally prior to submitting your grant application.

While every effort is made by the Research Office and biosafety and ethics committees to quickly and efficiently process and review applications and communicate with researchers, delays may be encountered if issues raised by proposed research need to be clarified, if information provided in applications is insufficient, or if conditions are attached to approval of a project. Final Approval letters are only issued by the biosafety and ethics committees when all conditions attached to approval have been met.

• If you have applied for biosafety and/or ethical clearance for work which is part of a grant application it is your responsibility as the grant applicant to provide Macquarie University's Ethics Secretariat ethics.secretariat@vc.mq.edu.au with a copy of Final Approval letter(s) issued to you by the biosafety and/or ethics committee(s) as soon as possible.
• The Grants Officer will not inform external funding agencies that you have final approval for your project until he has received from you copies of relevant biosafety and/or ethics committee Final Approval letter(s) for your project.
• Macquarie University will not allow funds for your project to be released until the Grants Officer is holding a copy of the relevant biosafety and/or ethics committee Final Approval letters for your project.

If you believe the work described in your grant application is already covered by a number of current approvals from the biosafety and/or ethics committee(s) which together cover the work you are seeking funding for

OR

If you believe the work described in your grant application is already covered by a current biosafety or ethics committee approval BUT the Project Title of your grant application is different to the Project Title named in your biosafety or ethics application

• You will need to provide the Grants Officer with written confirmation (eg, in the form of a memo) that the project for which you have applied for funding is covered by one or more current biosafety and / or ethics committee approvals.
• This certification memo should be signed by yourself and counter-signed by the relevant biosafety or ethics committee Chair.
• Copies of relevant Final Approval letters should be attached to the certification memo.
• A copy of the certification memo should also be forwarded to the Ethics Secretariat ethics.secretariat@vc.mq.edu.au.

Research Funded by NHMRC

In its Advice and Instructions to Applicants (December 2000) NHMRC advised that:

• Research funded by the NHMRC must be considered in accordance with the Joint NHMRC/AVCC Statement and Guidelines on Research Practice
• Research should comply with established guidelines and will not be funded until all relevant approvals, ethical and/or biosafety, have been received and lodged with the Administering Institution's Research Office, and then relayed to the NHMRC.
• It is the Applicant's responsibility to ensure that a copy of his/her project application is referred to the relevant Institutional Ethics Committee or other approval body. It is also his/her responsibility to ensure that the completed approval form is forwarded to the Institution's Research Office who will hold a copy of the form.
• The Research Administration Officer responsible for the application must advise NHMRC when ethics clearances have been granted by the relevant Institutional Ethics Committee.
• The NHMRC policy on the timing of approvals is that all relevant approvals should be obtained, where possible, before NHMRC funding decisions are made and preferably before the final ranking of applications is made (ie: before 12 July).
• NHMRC reserves the right to request all information relating to decisions regarding ethical issues arising from an application and the institutional response to the application.
• Provisional approvals are not acceptable.
• Finally, grants will be forfeited if approval is not obtained by 1 July in the year that a grant is awarded.