Rutgers Office For Research Announces Important Updates to RAPSS

Rutgers Office for Research (OfR) continues to improve its processes to support better the research, scholarship, and creative endeavors of ALL faculty at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

The OfR has announced that RAPSS, the Research Administration and Proposal Submission System that is used by Rutgers researchers for the submission, review, approval, and tracking of sponsored award submissions and related budgets, has received an update that will simplify the system to improve the user experience and reduce administrative burden.

“We are very excited to show the Rutgers research community the improvements we have made to the RAPSS system,” said Diane Ambrose, assistant vice president of Sponsored Programs, Policy, and Training. “This update is the culmination of a years-long effort to collect information from users and stakeholders such as faculty and department administrators, and we cannot thank them enough for their time and feedback.”

The updates to RAPSS will enhance the user experience by simplifying the award submission and modification process, adding the ability to assign a proxy, improving principal investigator (PI) notifications, and granting users the ability to review related activity such as IRB protocols, COI disclosures, and related agreements. Adding a dashboard for users also allows additional visibility into proposal status.

“These updates to RAPSS are thanks to the dedication of the RSP and Office for Research IT teams as well as users and stakeholders who assisted in the process,” said José Román, vice president of research administration in the Office for Research. “I am incredibly proud of the initiative, time, and effort the RSP team put into this endeavor, and I know RAPSS users will be pleased with the result.”

“A key aspect of the vision and mission of the Office for Research is simplicity,” said Michael E. Zwick, senior vice president for Research. “As part of our goal to improve the efficiency and use of our programs, we constantly strive to make policies easy to understand and processes as smooth as possible. The RAPSS updates will accomplish both objectives.”

The Research and Sponsored Programs team has created guidance documents, which can be found here, and will hold training sessions to review the changes to RAPSS. Please visit https://research.rutgers.edu/rapss/training to sign up for training.