CLAS and UF encourage researchers to apply for external funding to support their research. Such external funding comes with conditions imposed by the sponsor and is also subject to university, state and federal policies and regulations. Failing to meet any of these conditions, policies, or regulations can have adverse financial, legal, and reputational consequences for the individual researcher(s) and/or the university. For this reason, most external funding requests require formal approval inside UF before the request can be submitted to the sponsor.
This page provides a summary of university and CLAS policies. Links to authoritative resources are provided on the Research Policies and Guidance page and below.
Proposals
A proposal is an external funding request that, if successful, will directly result in the award of funds. In most cases, a proposal is written by individual researcher(s) but formally submitted by UF, and it is the university that will be the legal recipient of any resulting award.
UF requires that proposals, supplemental funding requests, progress reports with detailed budgets, or other requests that may directly result in award of funds be entered in UFIRST. UFIRST will electronically route the request and collect required approvals. In CLAS, this approval process is managed on behalf of researchers by the CLAS Research Office or by staff in the Principal Investigator’s unit (per the assignment of responsibilities at https://researchoffice.clas.ufl.edu/services/).
Pre-Proposals
A pre-proposal (also called a white paper or a letter of intent) is usually a short description of a project used by the sponsor to determine who will be invited to submit a full proposal. A pre-proposal typically includes a brief summary of the scope of work and information about the research team.
Any pre-proposal that contains a budget broken down by categories, explicit commitment of UF personnel effort, or cost sharing (uncompensated commitment of UF resources) must be routed through UFIRST just like a proposal.
If a pre-proposal does not require UFIRST routing according to the criteria above but does require an official signature from the Division of Sponsored Programs (DSP) on behalf of the university (either a signature on a document or electronic submission from an official DSP account in a sponsor portal such as Research.gov), then a request must be emailed to ufproposals@ufl.edu. Help with such a request will be provided by the CLAS Research Office or by staff in the Principal Investigator’s unit (per the assignment of responsibilities at https://researchoffice.clas.ufl.edu/services/).
Any pre-proposal that requires neither UFIRST routing nor an official DSP signature may be submitted directly by the Principal Investigator to the sponsor.
For more advice on how to decide whether a pre-proposal must be routed to DSP prior to submission, see https://research.ufl.edu/dsp/proposals/pre-proposals-letters-of-intent-white-papers.html.