Products
The SECURE Center operates as a federally funded, national initiative dedicated to enhancing research security (RS) by providing unique solutions identified, prioritized, designed, and developed by and with the research community, for the research community. In year 1, a National Center was established with five Regional Centers covering all U.S. states, ensuring broad engagement and coordinated delivery of resources and services to the research community.
The Center initiated its work by conducting assessments with 56 focus groups with 150+ RS professionals to identify challenges and prioritize resource needs. The Center has also developed a prototype Shared Virtual Environment which is currently undergoing user testing and refinement. The Center’s work is geared at enabling trusted collaboration, knowledge exchange, and access to actionable RS resources. Initiatives will aim to reduce compliance costs, administrative burden, and redundancies through scalable digital infrastructure, shared resources, and coordinated federal engagement. Products and services developed in project year 1 can be found below. Products and activities planned for year 2 are detailed here. Additional products and activities will be added over the course of project year 2.
Travel Resources
This toolkit consists of three resources to help RSOs / Compliance Officers guide and advise their faculty on international travel and how to best protect themselves and their research IP. The three resources in this toolkit are:
Basic Travel Checklist
Designed for all international travelers and focuses on cybersecurity and other considerations for protecting research data, intellectual property, and personal information.
High Risk Travel Checklist
Designed for high-risk international travelers and focuses on cybersecurity and operational considerations for protecting research data, intellectual property, devices and security credentials.
Resource Guide
Provides additional context to the checklist content; includes travel case studies and additional resources and implementation considerations for rolling out a travel awareness campaign.
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Risk Assessment Framework
The Research Security Risk Assessment Framework was co-designed with subject matter experts and research security community stakeholders to identify and address potential threats to research while supporting international collaboration. The framework provides a list of factors that may pose risk to the research enterprise, questions to consider as a guide for conducting a risk assessment, tools and resources to collect relevant information, and a template to support due diligence with documentation and recordkeeping.
Risk Assessment Framework
The framework is adaptable for use by any institution, regardless of size, structure, or available resources. Institutions can use the framework to conduct risk assessments, develop new institutional risk assessment processes, benchmark and improve existing workflows, and train and educate staff.
Federal Risk Matrix Overview
A reference for research security professionals who perform pre-audits on proposals, faculty hiring screening or related duties that require application of federal risk matrices. The key advantage is the comparison of requirements across all mandating agencies to quickly navigate interpretations and use of the matrices to a case.
Process Pathfinder
This resource helps you to create, execute and facilitate tabletop exercises to understand and refine organizational operations.
Process Gates
A diagramming method to understand the existence and flow of organizational processes and the barriers they encounter.
Process Mapping
A diagramming method to understand the actions, persons and decisions involved in the response to an event or scenario.
Reference Resources
These documents provide foundational information on the subject of research security.
Research Security Reference Library
The Research Security Reference Library provides a comprehensive compilation of current and historical research security documents, including concise summaries and impact descriptions of federal-wide efforts, legislative requirements and congressional activities, and agency-specific policies.
