Bioinformatic Analysis Policies and Cost

Effective 1 July 2022

Operations and cost recovery policies for the Bioinformatic Analysis Shared Resource (BASR) are defined by a nine-member FAC, six of which are Cancer Center members. The FAC is chaired by Dr. K-T Varley with senior director oversight by Dr. Alana Welm.

Bioinformatic services are available to all University of Utah (UU) researchers at the same cost, with no preference in priority or pricing. They are subject to either an hourly or % FTE recharge for time dedicated to investigator projects. The recharge fees aim to recover ~40% of the Core’s client service operating budget. As such, services are substantially subsidized for UU investigators.

Hourly Rates

• $0 first hour new project consultation
• $70/hr for Investigators with a billable UU chartfield for up to 75 hours per fiscal year
• $160/hr for Investigators without a chartfield or for Investigators that have exceeded their annual 75 hours

All hourly charge back requires an active work authorization form with HCI Purchasing (email WAF to Lori.McManus@hci.utah.edu and David.Nix@hci.utah.edu).  Except for the initial project consultation, work may not begin without one.

Hours are billed for all activities that occupy an analyst while working on the project. This includes analysis, software development, compute job setup, paper and grant preparation, data uploads and downloads, email, meetings, literature reviews, etc. Only 10 hours may be expended on any given project at a time before servicing the next hourly rate job in the job queue.  Jobs are taken on a first come first serve basis.

FTE Rates

For projects requiring more than 20 hours of work, Investigators are strongly encouraged to include particular members of the BASR on their grants and pay for their time as a % effort. $50/hr – $100/hr is the FTE rate, depending on analyst’s salary and benefits. Contact the BASR director for specific rates for your project.

FTE funded projects take priority over hourly projects and are not limited in the number of hours that may be spent at a given time.  The most experienced and domain knowledgeable analyst will work with your project throughout.  Grant applications are more successful when a named bioinformatic analyst is assigned to a project. Notably, FTE is much less expensive after a group has exceeded their 75 hour annual allocation and, in some cases, less than the initial $70/hr rate. Work in excess of the hours provided by FTE will be billed using the hourly charge back mechanism.

Cloud Data Storage and Compute Charges

Investigators will be billed for costs incurred from use of genomic data storage and analysis providers such as Seven Bridges, DNAnexus, Terra, Carahsoft (AWS) and Burwood (GCP).

For sample sets < 100, all efforts will be made to utilize CHPC nodes to run analysis where computing costs are free to Investigators having been paid by HCI, UU, and through grants to CHPC.  For sample sets > 100, analysis jobs will be run using cloud services and their costs included in the BASR’s monthly billing. Depending on analysis requirements, per sample cloud compute costs vary from $5-$50 per sample.

For specific information about the expected cloud data storage and compute costs for your project, contact the BASR director.

Authorship

Authorship invitations are expected for all manuscripts where BASR analysts have made a key contribution e.g. novel method development, custom analysis, figure generation, contribution to paper findings.  Running standard analysis using previously developed off-the-shelf workflows is not typically worthy of authorship, everything else is. Promotion of team science, CCSG accountability/ renewal, employee retention/ career development - all are directly tied to authorship. Failure to offer authorship is a major disservice to the core and will to lead to a poor working relationship. Lastly, authorship invitation is not a substitute for cost recovery billing.

Required Acknowledgments

CCSG: All manuscript submissions that utilize the BASR are required to include the CCSG acknowledgment: "Research reported in this publication utilized the Bioinformatic Analysis Shared Resource at Huntsman Cancer Institute in the University of Utah and was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P30CA042014. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.”

CHPC: All submissions that utilized the BSRs clusters at the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) are required to include: "The computational resources used were partially funded by the NIH Shared Instrumentation Grant 1S10OD021644-01A1." This is likely for all but the most basic BSR Analysis.

Deviations from BASR Charge Back and Usage Policies

Occasionally, very compelling cases may arise where deviations from BASR policies should be considered.  In these situations, a written request should be submitted to the BASR director and HCI Senior Faculty Advisor who will then bring the request to the Faculty Advisory Committee and Chair for a vote.