Pre-Approval

All individuals employed by Indiana University (IU) or research investigators must submit activities for pre-approval.

This includes faculty, academic appointees, student academic appointees, staff members, and part-time employees.

Research investigators are any individuals involved in the design, conduct, or reporting of research conducted at IU.

• Any compensated outside activity that reasonably appears to be related to your IU responsibilities
• An outside professional activity that may reduce the time available for the appointee to carry out the primary obligations of the individual’s appointment
• Any situation that would constitute a conflict of commitment, as defined in BOT-34
• Creation of a new company such as a faculty start-up, non-profit, or consulting company
• Consulting
• Teaching for other institutions, even online teaching, or honorary appointments at foreign institutions
• Research activities where funding is entirely managed outside of IU
• Undertaking activities that compete, or have the potential to compete, with Indiana University in areas that are part of the appointee’s or staff’s university responsibilities.
• Significant changes in existing outside activity such as increased time commitment or increased compensation
• The use of university resources for activities not related to IU.

For more detailed guidance, please visit BOT-34 Guidance.

All activities that are pre-approved also have to be disclosed on the COI disclosure form, and the pre-approval system pushes data entered in the pre-approval system into the Kuali COI system. Once an activity receives approval in the pre-approval system, a revised version of the COI disclosure is automatically created within the Kuali COI system, incorporating answers already entered into the pre-approval system.

A list of example activities that need different forms of approval can be found in the guidance documents.

The form goes through several levels of review depending on the type of activity including a unit reviewer, Human Resources, University Compliance, and the Office of Research Compliance and possibly the Innovation and Commercialization Office and Research Security Office if applicable.

Each review level will assess compliance with IU Conflicts of Interest and Commitment policy, BOT-34, IU intellectual property policies, UA-23 and UA-24, and research security policies, RP-11-012.

The pre-approval system has a section that shows the history or tracking of the review process; this indicates who performed the review, and the time of the review as well as the current status of the review.

If there is concern that the activity does not meet IU policy requirements, the individual submitting the pre-approval will be contacted to discuss concerns prior to any disapproval action taken.

Pre-approval of external activity request forms can be completed by selecting the Pre-Approval of External Activity Request Form task in One IU.