Greetings to all our colleagues across the water!  From Scotland I
have been reading with enormous interest your discussions about the
indirect cost.  Our situations, contexts, procedures and practice are
very different, but, still, our principles - and indeed the whole ghastly
business of being a research administrator - are deeply the same.

I thought you might be interested in a report we have just produced
and which will be presented to a seminar this week.  Our
group is called RAGnet, the network of a UK Research Administrators
Group, and the report is called 'Operating at the Margins', by Lynn
Wheatley and Eileen Clucas.  It analyses the cost of running a
research centre.  In particular we have been concerned not so much
with the host institution's overhead (which is what a lot of your
discussion has been about), but with the research centre's cost.  For
instance,  I reckon there are 8 separate activities in a research centre:
compiling a research proposal, training to do the research, managing
and organising the institution so that we can do the research, doing
the research and writing the report, disseminating the research,
accounting for our performance, fulfilling the academic and public
responsibilities which accrue as the result of our successful
research, and wooing the users to give us the money to start all over
again.  Of these eight activities, only one is properly funded, and our
sponsors don't recognise it.   How on earth is scholarship to have a
proper place in our society under these conditions?

If you'd like to see the report, do email Anne Hall
(xxxxxx@itsnov.leeds.ac.uk - or whatever way round you have to put
the address from the USA), who is in charge of RAGnet publications.

The report is to be presented at a DORCISS seminar (Association of
Directors of Research Centres in the Social Sciences), called
Managing Research Centres Finances, at the University of Leeds on
November 10 and 11.  Do also email Anne if you're interested in the
seminar.

You can also email Eileen Clucas, one of the report's co-authors, on
xxxxxx@uk.ac.essex.

If you're interested in RAGnet (and we have a subscribing community,
a newsletter, lots of interesting activities, and were responsible for
helping get EARMA off the ground (The European Association of
Research Managers and Administrators), please contact its current
Chair:  Charlotte Wellington (email: xxxxxx@snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk)

For EARMA, please contact its Secretary, Nick Cook (email:
xxxxxx@newcastle.ac.uk

With best wishes to all,

Joan Hughes (ex-chair RAG, and Research Administrator at the Centre
for Educational Sociology, University of Edinburgh)