NIH Privacy Officer Memo

DATE: April 10, 2015

TO: William Duval, Ph.D.

Program Analyst

Office of Extramural Research

National Institutes of Health

FROM: NIH Privacy Act Officer

SUBJECT: Applicability of the Privacy Act: Science and Technology for America’s Reinvestment: Measuring the Effects of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science (STAR METRICS®)

I have reviewed the NIH submission to OMB referenced above. NIH, in conjunction with four other federal agencies, has engaged in a partnership with universities entitled STAR METRICS®. The multi-year project involves the development of an inter-agency mechanism to account for the number of scientists, students and staff that are on research organization payrolls and supported by federal funds. The data collected will be used to produce open, transparent and auditable reports that discuss the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) on job creation and economic growth.

The data collected from the academic institutions will include information on scientists and awards, information on overhead, payments to vendors and sub-contracts and sub-awards. The university will then run queries to extract the required data. After the extracted data is validated, the university will transmit the data from their systems to the secure STAR METRICS® data repository (i.e., website) where the team will perform a number of data cleansing, matching and processing steps to create and format reports. The STAR METRICS® team will produce the reports and upload them to the secure website to be approved by the university’s personnel.

I have determined that the Privacy Act will not apply to this information collection because the STAR METRICS® system will not store personally identifiable information and is not designed to retrieve information by a unique identifier.

If you have questions, please contact me at (301) 402-6201.

Karen M. Plá

cc: Mikia Currie, OD PRA Liaison