Greeting from Mr. Young Dae MIN of KOSEF

On 2 February 2004, JSPS called the second meeting of administrative staffs of Japanese Core Universities, the first core University Administrative Meeting having been held on 27 August 2003.

The Core University Program (CUP), which comprises large-scale international collaborations between Japan and Asian countries, requires close communication between JSPS and Japanese universities to facilitate the program's financial arrangements. This second meeting, accommodating over 70 staffs from all 29 core universities, was held to explain the new administrative procedures for CUP that will go into effect pursuant to the FY2004 reorganization of Japanese national universities, converting them into "national university corporations."

The staffs of JSPS's Asian Program Division and Accounting Division explained the revised accounting guidelines for CUP, which will be in effect from April 2004, to participants from the Japanese core universities. In the following Q&A session, an intensive discussion took place between the staffs of the universities and of JSPS.

The new guidelines affect the Japanese core universities in the following ways:

• They will need to submit fewer documents to JSPS,
• They will be able to calculate the cost of exchanges, based on their own accounting regulations
  (previously, all universities were required to follow JSPS's regulations),
• They may use a percentage of program funding to cover their own overhead (up to 10% of all funds received from JSPS), and
• They will no longer donate books to counterpart country universities, unless special permission is obtained from JSPS.

Intensive discussions took place

At meeting's end, a delegation from the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF), who were at JSPS that day to hold a joint staff meeting, were introduced to the participants from the universities. The KOSEF delegation consisted of Mr. Young-Dae MIN, Director General for academic exchanges, Mr. Byung-Whan HO, Director of International Program Division, Ms. Yera LEE, Program Manager of International Program Division and Dr. Kyeong Su JANG, Head of KOSEF Tokyo office. JSPS and KOSEF enjoy an excellent relationship with various cooperative programs, among them are six mutually supported core university projects, each progressing smoothly. Exchanging greetings with the guests from Korea, the university staffs promised to do their best to promote exchanges under the Core University Program between Japan and Korea.