Faculty members are required to disclose any outside professional activities and financial interests that could potentially influence their work at Stanford.
They must provide this information annually (via an online certification), as well as each time they engage in transactions such as sponsored research, submitting human subject and animal protocols, technology licensing arrangements, etc.
Prompted by new federal regulations, AS worked with the Dean of Research and other major stakeholders in FY12 to redesign the system used for this process — the Outside Professional Activities Certification System (OPACS).
Last Spring AS migrated the annual certification to a custom-developed application on the Oracle Application Express (APEX) platform.
This change enabled OPACS to store all prior conflict of interest (CoI) reports, making them available for faculty to reference when completing subsequent annual certifications. Since much of this data remains unchanged from year to year, this addressed faculty frustrations with having to re-enter the same information manually each year.
Following up on the spring release, AS integrated OPACS with eProtocol and the Stanford Electronic Research Administration (SeRA) system in August.
The result is a seamless interface with OPACS for both systems. Faculty are now able to leverage their previously entered annual disclosure data when completing their research-required disclosures.
Contact Nirmala Balasubramanian for more information about OPACS.
