We are pleased to announce significant updates to the Electronic Cover Sheet system.
This initiative is a collaboration between the Office of the Vice-President, Research and International (OVPRI) and Information Systems & Technology (IST).
Our team is seeking feedback from our Waterloo community members who utilize the Electronic Cover Sheet system. This feedback will help establish requirements for the updates.
Background
With the goal of digitizing a paper/PDF form and manual process, the Electronic Cover Sheet system was launched in 2021 and is a mandatory internal IT system for all proposals seeking research funding. It is utilized by researchers and facilitates approvals from the six Faculties, Affiliated & Federated Institutions of Waterloo, centres and institutes, academic support units, and the OVPRI.
Following a thorough assessment of our current Electronic Cover Sheet system in Fall 2023, the OVPRI and IST recommended migrating the underlying system to an alternative platform that can accommodate necessary enhancements.
This migration offers an opportunity to consult on enhancements. Thus, we are gathering feedback from the research community to help identify any changes or suggestions for new features, such as:
- Usability improvements: Improve usability, performance, and enhance end-user experience.
- Adaptability: Support and combine evolving requirements including those for annual attestations, conflict of interest, safeguarding research, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Intellectual Property rights disclosures (Policy 73).
- Reporting: Detailed reporting functionality with appropriate security controls to support research administration processes.
We will be paying particular attention to ensuring a smooth transition to a new system that will deliver substantial improvements with minimal disruption.
We would appreciate your feedback by responding to this brief survey by October 18, to tell us about your experiences with the current system and make suggestions for an updated system.
If you have any questions, please reach out to n2mckay@uwaterloo.ca or the VPRI Systems team