Funding Opportunities
The USC VPR’s Office of Research supports USC faculty and student researchers directly through internal funding and award programs. Browse the USC Internal Funding and Awards pages to identify potential funding opportunities.
Research Directory Tools
Use these tools to network with other researchers, build collaborations, or identify research projects.
Palmetto Profiles is a research networking and expertise tool to help connect researchers to others with the expertise they may need. It not only shows traditional directory information, but also illustrates how each person is connected to others in the broad research community. This tool is currently used by researchers at USC School of Medicine, MUSC, and Clemson.
The Faculty Expertise Database (FacED), is maintained by the Office of the Vice President for Research's IT and Data Management Team, and powered by data drawn from USCeRA, USC's electronic research administration software system. This robust tool was developed to foster research collaboration and to showcase the wide array of expertise and talent offered by the faculty of the University of South Carolina.
Research Tools
COS Pivot is a database containing funding opportunities for all disciplines and project types. It includes information on federal, private, and international funding options. It is available to all University of South Carolina faculty, staff and students, who may register for free.
DMPTool is a free tool to help researchers create data management plans that comply with funder requirements. It walks users through the components required by the funder they're applying to, and allows them to create a completed DMP, which can be exported as a Word document or PDF.
eIRB manages the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process for human subjects research by providing a single platform to unify and streamline the IRB operations of participating organizations. This web-based, paperless system supports initial applications, tracking, and routing of all submission types through the approval process and documents information required for the review of human subjects’ research. This includes the initial application, amendments, reportable events, and continuing renewal submissions.
EndNote is a citation management and bibliography-creation tool. All USC School of Medicine faculty, staff, and students have access to EndNote Online through the Library's Web of Science subscription. With EndNote Online, your citations are stored in the cloud rather than on your desktop.
Create an account and learn how to use EndNote on the SOM Library LibGuide.
The University Libraries, with support from the Office of the Vice President for Research, can help defray the costs of publishing in fully open access journals. This fund offers stipends for article processing charges (APCs) on a first-come, first-served basis until the fund is depleted. USC Columbia faculty, staff, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars can apply for one stipend per fiscal year.
OpenRefine is a free, open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data.
The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free and open source web application built by the Center for Open Science that provides all researchers with a mechanism to organize, collaborate, share, and store components of their research projects. It is designed to help teams collaborate in one centralized location.
OSF can also be used as a public data repository to meet certain funding requirements.
REDCap is a self-service tool available for surveys as well as data acquisition, capture, and management, and is provided to all USC students, staff, and faculty. The survey tool allows for various survey scenarios, including conditional logic, data uploads, and advanced formatting. All data are stored on a secure server and can be exported to formats useful to researchers for statistical analysis.
Tableau Public is free software that can allow anyone to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations for the web.
USC Resources
From data management, analysis and visualization to digital publishing and archiving, USC librarians offer services to support you in all stages of the research process.
Visit Digital Research Services.
The SAM office supports faculty and staff by facilitating proposal submission, award negotiation and administration of externally funded sponsored projects.
Visit the SAM website.
The University of South Carolina Electronic Research Administration system, known as USCeRA, is USC's central research administration software system. Researchers use USCeRA to create and provide information about the proposal, complete USC and some federally required forms, upload proposal components and route proposals for all necessary approvals as well as maintain their academic and research profiles.