Terms & Conditions

RSF grants are administered by the principal investigator’s institution. RSF will make the first payment on the grant once all due diligence requirements have been met and a grant agreement has been fully executed. Visiting Scholar Fellowships are similarly awarded to the scholar’s institution. The fellowship is paid out to the institution in two equal payments during the fellowship term.

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.

Grantees in the Sheldon Danziger Pipeline Grant Program and the Causal Research on the Criminal Justice System Grant Program will be expected to present their findings at a capstone conference. Investigators, mentors, advisory committee members, and other experts will participate. RSF will reimburse participants for reasonable travel expenses to attend the conference.

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 has an active publishing program, and the Foundation reserves the right to publish any book-length manuscript that results from research funded through its Core Research Grant program. 

Please review additional dissemination requirements under Information for Grantees.

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 datasets 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 restricted, proprietary, and qualitative data. Note that this requirement does not apply to RSF’s Dissertation Research Grant Program.

Please review additional dissemination requirements under Information for Grantees.

The Foundation expects scholars to fully engage in the intellectual life of RSF during the term of the full-time residential fellowship, including interacting with other fellows and RSF staff in areas of mutual interest, delivering a seminar presentation on a research project, attending all other weekly seminars, and reviewing an occasional proposal or manuscript. Fellows must be in office at least 75 percent of the days that RSF is open.

If an applicant is selected as a Visiting Scholar, Foundation policy does not allow the applicant to defer their visit. If the applicant is not able to come for the fellowship year for which they are selected, they will need to reapply for a subsequent fellowship year.

Individuals offered a fellowship at RSF may not apply for funding from RSF from the time they receive their appointment letter until their fellowship is completed. In exceptional circumstances, RSF may consider applications for special initiatives with limited funding rounds. While in residence at RSF, visiting scholars may work on an ongoing RSF grant. However, the scholar cannot use RSF funding to supplement their visiting scholar salary provided by RSF.