I would like to follow up on Bill Stevens question and comments
concerning recovering salaries in your charges. His summary of responses
follows:
>With regard to NMR charges recovering salaries, only one respondent out of
>more than 20 clearly recovered salaries. Most others recovered overhead,
though.
As with most things, my response would have been yes and no. We
recover a portion of our salaries. That portion would be substantially
smaller were I actually allowed to fill a slot that shows up formally in my
"budget". I have felt for a long time that what I would like to see in a
survey is something along the lines of what percentage of your total
operating costs, i.e. cryogens, pens, paper, and all the usual "things",
plus salaries and benefits, do you actually recover. (Since major
instrumentation acquisition is usually primarily from granting agencies, I
don't count that as "operating costs". As you know some matching funds are
usually required but I still consider that a different sort of category from
operating costs.) A few years ago, our departmental administration made
the decision that all shops and services within the department would have to
recover 75% of that total. Since we have never recovered anything like that
much, either I had better start selling off our equipment and replacing it
with video games or they will have to become more realisitic in their goals.
I haven't looked carefully at this fiscal year, but previous years have not
exceeded something on the order of about 40% even including the above ploy
of claiming, then "giving back" 100% of a staff position as part of my 75%
recovery. (Too bad I don't have about 10 more of these virtual people so my
% would look even better.)
If you would be willing to divulge information concerning the
percentage of your actual recovery of total operating costs from external
funds, I think that would make for a far more useful survey than just
recharge rates. If I receive any responses to this query, I will post them
anonymously unless specifically requested to not do so.
Jane Strouse
Dept. of Chemistry & Biochemistry
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1569
(310)-825-9841
(310)-825-0393 FAX
strousej@chem.ucla.edu