Costing

SBC time is typically funded via internal or external grants, not through overheads. Most UKRI funders are aware of the role of core facility staff and actively encourage their deployment on grants.

SBC costing (grant-funded)

Outside of the free activities that we organise, SBC time must be paid for from internal or external sources. In many cases this will require you to budget for SBC time as part of your grant application. The SBC Team can assist with this an advice you as to what is appropriate for your needs. Enquiries should be made to bioinformatics-core@sheffield.ac.uk. Your faculty Research Hub should also make you aware of this requirement.

We can provide staffing for your grants (charged as 'directly incurred' costs) in one of two ways:-

• Costing a %FTE of an existing named staff member
• Adding Bioinformatics Core time as a Facility charge on the costing tool at our hourly rate of £85, which would be more appropriate for short-term work

You can also add the SBC director (currently Dr. Mark Dunning) as a co-investigator on your grant for a small directly-incurred %FTE time. This would be to provide guidance and direction on the project as a whole, and is appealing to grant funders

If you require a dedicated 100% role for your team or project then we recommend recruiting this directly with support from SBC. See below.

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SBC “service” / ad-hoc costing

If you require paid Bioinformatics support which cannot be budgeted into a research grant, or was not budgeted at the time, then we provide a different mechanism for providing Bioinformatics support. In this case we charge an hourly rate of £85 for internal grants and £100 for external partners and industry.

Contributing to the SBC team (100% FTE staff)

If you have a considerable requirement for Bioinformatics support you may consider appointing a Bioinformatics staff member, and have them affiliated with the SBC. By doing so you will ensure that a member of staff will exist with the specific skills that you require for your research. The staff member will be part of the SBC and benefit from our mentorship and support, but will be tasked with delivering outputs for your research project. There will be significant gains in project setup as the staff member will have access to our existing pipelines and framework.

If the staff member leaves TUoS at the end of their contract, the work they produce will be retained within the SBC and can be retrieved at any point.

Examples of current and past contributors in this manner include The Department of Biosciences, Division of Neuroscience (NIHR BRC) and Division of Clinical Medicine.