CBI Policies and Cost

Despite being renamed the Cancer Bioinformatics Shared resource, the CBI works on all analysis requests with the same priority and pricing regardless of cancer/non-cancer focus. That said, the CBI develops workflows and platforms aimed at addressing the needs of cancer related projects. 

Note: the High Throughput Genomics (HTG) Shared Resource is entirely separate from the CBI and has no cancer specialization. Likewise, it provides sequencing services for all projects at the University of Utah.

Operations and cost recovery policies for CBI are administered by a seven-member faculty advisory committee (FAC), six of whom are Cancer Center members. The FAC is chaired by Sean Tavtigian, PhD with senior director oversight by AC Tan, PhD.

Requests are subject to either an hourly or % FTE recharge for time dedicated to investigator projects. The recharge fees aim to recover ~40% of CBI's client service operating budget. As such, services are significantly subsidized for University of Utah (UU) investigators.

Hourly Rates

• $0 first hour new project consultation
• $70/hr for investigators with a billable UU chartfield for the first 70 hours per fiscal year
• $100/hr for each hour past the initial 70 hours

All hourly charge back requires an active work authorization form with HCI purchasing (email Hourly WAF to hci-srbilling@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 job in the Jira queue. Jobs are taken on a first come first serve basis.

FTE Rates

For projects requiring more than 190 hours of work (20% FTE), investigators are encouraged to include particular members of the CBI on their grants and pay for their time as a % effort. Contact the CBI director for specific analyst’s rates. Work in excess of the hours provided by FTE will be billed using the hourly charge back mechanism. FTE work obligations end upon termination regardless of the actual work performed.

Cloud Data Storage and Compute Charges

Investigators will be billed for costs incurred from use of genomic data storage and analysis providers such as Velsera, DNAnexus, Terra, AWS, GCP, and Azure. Usage of cloud services requires completion of a Cloud WAF. Please complete the form and return it to  hci-srbilling@hci.utah.edu .

For sample sets < 400, all efforts will be made to utilize CHPC nodes to run analysis where computing costs are free to UU investigators having been paid by HCI and through grants to CHPC. For sample sets > 400, analysis jobs will be run using cloud services and their costs included in the CBI’s monthly billing. Depending on analysis requirements, per sample cloud compute costs vary between $5–$50 per sample.

Authorship

Authorship invitations are expected for all manuscripts where CBI 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 CBI 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 CBI are required to include the CCSG acknowledgment: "Research reported in this publication utilized the Cancer Bioinformatics 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 CBI’s 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 CBI analysis.

Deviations from CBI Charge Back and Usage Policies

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