indirect costs

["Jim O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

Jean-Claude is right that indirect cost recovery dollars don't 
flow easily back to the things that generate those costs. 
Here's roughly the pattern:

1.  We fight with the feds to get them to agree to the highest 
possible rate of indirect costs based on our demonstrated costs 
over the last N years.  We end with a rate that we all know is 
below the actual rate.  Let's say 2.5% of a 55% ICR rate is 
library.  So on a $1M grant, there out to be $550K for ICR and 
$2.5K for the library. In other words, if we do $500M in 
research, we'll supposedly have a million and a quarter for the 
library.  (Georgetown doesn't come close to $500M -- only a 
handful do.)

2.  If we gave the library that $1.25M, of course, a large slice 
of it would go for facilities depreciation, heat, light, 
utilities, security, staffing, etc. -- only a fraction (others 
would have to guess what that would be) would go to collections 
materials -- and of that only a fraction to materials whose 
subscriptions could someday be cancelled to free up $$ to support 
OA publication.

3.  But in the real world, that $1.25M does not go to the 
library.  We choose ("we":  every major research university I 
know of) to swallow most of the ICR dollars into central fungible 
dollars to pay for fighting the next fire (see my last message) 
-- the last couple of years, utility bills have been the monster 
elbowing its way into the room, for example.  And we also take a 
chunk of the money and divide it back to the individual 
researcher, his/her department, and his or her school -- as 
incentive to pursue more grant-funded research, and incidentally 
to cover some of the *necessary* costs of research that are 
covered neither by direct grant nor by indirect costs.  It's 
complicated to describe that, but it is essentially an accounting 
tool to provide in concrete form the subsidy that every research 
enterprise needs if it is to survive.

It is not, in other words, that grants and their indirect costs 
support the library.  It would be truer to say in many 
institutions that the library forgoes dollars it could otherwise 
have in order to subsidize research grants.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U .