Pipeline Grants Terms and Conditions

Administrative Procedures
The grant must be administered by the grantee’s university. RSF will pay the entire grant amount upon submission of all completed grant documents. At the end of the grant period, the investigator(s) must submit a final substantive report to RSF along with an official financial report from the university and copies of all research papers supported by the grant.

Before a grant agreement is issued, RSF requires confirmation of the following:

Proprietary and Restricted Access Datasets: If the successful completion of a project depends on access to data sources that are not publicly available, the grant would be contingent on written confirmation of access to these data sources.

IRB Approval: RSF requires written confirmation of Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for all research projects involving human subjects, or IRB exemption if not applicable.

Pre-registration: Pre-registration is important for various reasons: to ameliorate “publication bias,” as a source of results for meta-analysis, to find out about available survey instruments, and to access and download data. As a condition for providing substantial support for randomized controlled trials (RCTs), RSF requires RCTs to be pre-registered. Investigators must include as part of their application where and when they plan to pre-register the trials. In other cases, RSF may strongly recommend pre-registration as a funding condition. Some existing registries include:

Research Conference:
The funded researchers will be expected to present their findings at a capstone conference. Investigators, mentors, advisory committee members, and other experts will participate. The conference will focus on improving the quality of the research and also foster collaboration among researchers. RSF will reimburse participants for reasonable travel expenses to attend the conference.

Dataset Release: Publishing data and all associated materials from research projects is valuable because it allows others to examine the robustness of reported results and facilitates fuller re-use of collected data in general. As a condition for providing substantial support for new data collection, RSF requires that the investigators make their data sets publicly available to the social science research community. Investigators must include as part of their proposal a plan for public release of the data and documentation. RSF will consider exceptions for proprietary data and qualitative data.

Book Manuscripts:
RSF does not consider or prioritize the type of publications proposed by investigators (e.g., journal articles, book manuscript) in its evaluation and selection of projects for funding. However, RSF does have an active publishing program and if a book is proposed, the foundation reserves the right to publish.