Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher discloses 200 hours of free HPC time provided by an overseas institutional partner.
- Is an instance
A donation of bespoke laboratory reagents from a foreign collaborator is disclosed as an in-kind contribution.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A standard departmental allocation of office space at the home institution is generally not reported as in-kind under these frameworks.
- Not an instance
Open-source software downloaded under a public licence is not an in-kind contribution from a specific source.
Editorial commentary
An in-kind contribution is any non-monetary resource that supports a researcher’s work — laboratory access, donated or loaned equipment, materials or reagents, personnel time such as a hosted graduate student or technician, proprietary datasets, or complimentary computing time — provided without a matching financial transaction that would otherwise show up in grant or institutional financial records. Research-security policy treats in-kind support as functionally equivalent to cash support for disclosure purposes: the concern is the resource and the relationship behind it, not whether money changed hands.
Where it gets reported
In-kind contribution disclosure is not a standalone form. It is a required category within the broader disclosures an investigator already files — principally Current and Pending Support and, for NIH-funded investigators, Other Support. Both documents require in-kind resources to be listed by source and nature, alongside cash grants and paid appointments. As of an April 2026 SciENcv/eRA Commons system update, NIH and NSF’s shared systems allow entry of zero person-months of effort against a proposed, active, or in-kind item on the Current and Pending (Other) Support form — recognising that an in-kind contribution, unlike a salaried appointment, often involves no reportable effort at all while still being disclosable.
The category exists because earlier disclosure frameworks, built around dollar thresholds and payment records, systematically under-captured this kind of support: a foreign laboratory that hosts a US researcher for a summer, or gifts a set of reagents, or extends free access to a supercomputing cluster generates no invoice for a compliance office to find. Whether formal monetary valuation is required varies by funder and form — some ask only for a description of the source and nature of the contribution, not a dollar estimate. What is consistently required is disclosing that the resource exists and where it came from. This is distinct from foreign component disclosure, which is triggered by where funded project work is physically performed rather than by receipt of a free resource — a project can receive an in-kind contribution without any part of the funded work occurring abroad, and vice versa.
Also known as
in-kind support · non-monetary support disclosure
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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