Negotiation and Acceptance

Negotiation of contracts depends on many factors. ORA will work as efficiently as possible to finalize your research agreements in a timely manner, however, there are a few things to be aware of:

1. Faculty and department staff are not authorized to sign any agreements on behalf of the institution. Institutional agreements must have an authorized signature or they may be deemed invalid which will further delay your project.
   
2. The best thing you can do is make sure that you have routed all of the required documentation to ORA. We can’t effectively negotiate the agreement until we have all of the information that we need. This includes (where possible) an editable version of any proposed agreement for review. If ORA is to draft the agreement(s), please indicate this in the Fibi record.
3. We prefer to use our template agreements with our preferred terms for all projects. However, regulations and institutional policies are subject to change. Prior to sending a template to a sponsor/collaborator, please check with ORA to ensure that the correct and most current agreement is used. Current ORA agreement templates can be viewed on the Award Management: Forms & Templates pages.
4. Depending upon what issues are relevant to your agreement(s), ORA may need to reach out to various different stakeholders and support offices across the University for input. This can sometimes take some time to arrange, but ORA commits to keeping you fully informed as the negotiations process proceeds.
5. A timely negotiation depends upon all parties being engaged and sharing the same (or similar) vision of the project and aligning on the appropriate type of agreement and terms contained therein. If the parties have diverging or incongruent views of the project, this can add time to the negotiations process.
6. Different projects carry different levels of institutional risk. The higher the risk, the longer the negotiations process may be.
7. All contracts and agreements must comport with institutional policies. If sponsors insist on terms that fall outside of or conflict with institutional policies, negotiations may be protracted and can even stall. ORA will always keep you informed of any potential issues we see with your agreement(s) and advise on possible paths forward.
8. ORA is not able to waive applicable institutional indirect cost rates. Please make sure your sponsors/collaborators are aware of and agree to these rates early so as not to delay the processing of your agreement(s).