The Justification of Resources (JoR) should include justification for:
- all Directly Incurred Costs
- investigator effort
- use of pool staff resources
- any access to shared facilities and equipment being sought.
In Je-S applications, up to two pages of A4 are allowed for this purpose.
No justification for Directly Allocated Estates and Indirect Costs is required. If resources are not fully justified, they will be subject to reduction.
The JoR should also include full justification of all sea-time and facility costs requested on applications.
For high performing computing (HPC) no cost estimates are required, but an estimate of the use of ARCHER in Million Allocation Units (MAUs) should be included and an application must be attached when use of ARCHER exceeds 160MAU (in any one year).
See an example of a well-written JoR. Our thanks to the authors of this text for providing their permission to publish it as a good practice guide.
You can find more guidance on writing a good JoR in the Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system help text. This guidance has been agreed by all research councils.
In applications submitted through the Funding Service, the equivalent of the ‘justification of resources’ is collected in the ‘resources and cost justification’ question. This question is not generally used as assessment criteria in NERC funding opportunities.