Sharing latest NIH updates, as well as a recent Notice affecting some May deadlines. Please read all the way down!!
NIH eSubmission Items of Interest – March 17, 2014
"No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn."
-Hal Borland
It sure feels like spring lost its place and went to the back of the line. It’s March 17 and Federal offices are closed again today due to snow. As I look outside at the white blanket covering, well, everything,
I find it hard to believe that the cherry blossom trees are expected to peak in three weeks. My sweater-clad, humiliated hound dogs and I are ready for warm weather and walks in the park and I’m sure we’re not alone. For now, it’s hot chocolate and teleworking…so,
let me take this opportunity to get you caught up on some stuff going on in NIH’s world of electronic grant application submission.
Application Due Dates and Weather
Despite the icky weather today, Federal staff are teleworking, help desks are open, grant application due dates are on and our
standard submission policies are in place. If your organization is closed due to weather, you can submit on the first day your organization reopens. Don’t forget to document your reason
for the late submission in your cover letter.
Applications & Project Titles
NIH’s eRA systems can now accept project titles (item 11 on the SF424 R&R cover form) of up to 200 characters. That’s right – eRA systems will no longer truncate your project titles to 81 characters. Over
the years we have seen some rather unfortunate truncations so this is a welcome and long overdue change.
Keep in mind that when submitting a Revision application, you must use the exact project title displayed in eRA Commons for the awarded application. If the project title of the awarded grant was truncated
to 81 characters, then only those 81 characters can be used for the Revision application.
eRA Systems Will Soon Support Greek & Other Unicode Characters
Over the long Memorial Day weekend, eRA systems will be upgraded to support the Unicode character standard (see
NOT-OD-14-071). Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode). What did we do before Wikipedia? Anyway, the bottom line is we will soon be able to recognize and store Greek and other scientific characters our systems can’t handle
today.
Although Grants.gov limits the characters allowed in application form fields, you can (and do) use a broader range of characters in your PDF attachments within your applications. eRA systems already extract
information from your Project Summary/Abstract, Specific Aims and other application attachments for use in Summary Statements and reporting systems. However, since our databases don’t currently recognize all the characters, quite a bit of manual manipulation
of the data is needed. The Unicode character support will greatly reduce the need to manually edit the data pulled from these attachments.
The effort to implement Unicode support touches every eRA service from eRA Commons through all our internal grants administration systems. Each of these systems will be updated over the Memorial Day weekend
downtime. We have made some adjustments to our application due dates to accommodate the downtime and to ensure all our systems are ready to go (see
NOT-OD-14-070).
We will also be bringing down our non-production environments, including eRA Commons Demo and External User Acceptance Test (Ext-UAT), for an extended period (March 25-April 5) to update these systems and
use them as a ‘practice run’ for our production changes.
Reference Letters & Fellowship Applications
Along with our upgrade to the latest OMB-approved application forms (FORMS-C), there was a change to our handling of reference letters for Fellowship applications. In the past,
NIH had required the use of a specific ‘Fellowship Reference Form’ to be filled out by referees. NIH is no longer requiring that specific reference letter format. Be sure, however, to follow the new instructions outlined in the
Individual Fellowship Application Guide SF424 (R&R)
Section 5.4 Letters of Reference, Part B. Instructions for Referees.
Submitting Change of Institution (Type 7) Requests & Relinquishing Statements Electronically
Do you need to submit a post-award Change of Institution (Type 7) request to NIH? If so, have you tried the electronic processes NIH has in place? NIH announced the piloting of electronic Type 7 applications
(NOT-OD-12-134) and associated Relinquishing Statements (NOT-OD-12-132) in August 2012. We are
moving towards requiring electronic processes for these actions and now is the time to become familiar with them.
Don’t forget, you must use the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) specifically published for Type 7 requests – Change of Grantee Organization (Type 7 Parent) –
PA-14-078.
Come See Us at the NIH Regional Conference
NIH will be back in Baltimore, MD June 25-27 for the
2014 NIH Regional Seminar on Program Funding and Grants Administration. I know budgets are tight, but this is a great event for anyone
new to the NIH grant process.
Hope to see you there!
In the meantime, think Springy, happy, warm thoughts and take care.
Sheri
Sheri Cummins
Communications & Outreach
NIH Office of Extramural Research
***************************************************************************************************************
Adjustments to May 25-28, 2014 Grant Application Due Dates
Notice Number: NOT-OD-14-070
Key Dates
Release Date: March 14, 2014
Related Announcements
NOT-OD-14-071
Issued by
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Purpose
This Notice informs the applicant community of application due date adjustments to accommodate scheduled federal system downtime (see
NOT-OD-14-071). Due dates that fall on or between May 25 and May 28, 2014 will move to May 29, 2014.
Changes to
Standard Due Dates
|
Activity Codes |
Program Description |
Original Due Date |
New Due Date |
|
P Series |
Program Project and Center Grants |
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
R18, U18, R25 |
Research Demonstration Education Programs |
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
T Series, D Series |
Institutional National Research Service Awards and Other Training Grants |
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
C06/UC6 |
Construction Grants |
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
G07, G08, G11, G13, G20, S11, S21, S22, SC1, SC2, SC3 |
Other Activity Codes |
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
G12, R10, U10, UG1, R24, U24, S06, U19, U45, U54, U56 |
Other Activity Codes |
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
Changes for FOAs with Non-standard Due Dates
|
Funding Opportunity |
Original Due Date |
New Due Date |
|
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 25, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 27, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 28, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
|
|
May 28, 2014 |
May 29, 2014 |
Applicants preparing multi-project applications using ASSIST will not have access to their applications during the downtime and should plan according for May deadlines.
Any applications submitted to Grants.gov during the downtime will be held at Grants.gov. Once service is restored, the applications will be processed by NIH and the submission results
will be made available in era Commons.
Inquiries
Please direct all inquiries to:
NIH Grants Information
Telephone: 301-435-0714
Email: [log in to unmask]