The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has announced that it is moving all post-award grant services online to the Research Councils’ Je-S system:
From the end of October any notification of successful grants and starting certificates from EPSRC will be sent directly to the institutational research office for approval, rather than to the Principal Investigator. No hard copies will be sent out at all in future for EPSRC-funded grants, although the Research Council will copy in the PI with an email informing them of the outcome of their application.
At present only EPSRC is taking the step to a completely online pre- and post-award system. But the announcement is significant because it predicts that a similar system will soon by adopted by all other research councils. This is likely to happen around 2010 when Research Councils move to a unified “Next Generation Back Office”, effectively a single point of contact for the administration of grants.