University of Georgia

Category: Announcements

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During FY13, more than 400 additional proposals were competitively reviewed by NSF.  Unfortunately, the number of new awards decreased by 6%.

The FY13 funding rate of 22% is down two percentage points from the previous year, and far below the 32% rate achieved in FY09, at the start of the economic downturn. A full 81% of NSF’s 1,922 awards went to academic institutions, accounting for 24% of all federally funded basic research performed at U.S. colleges and universities.

Additional statistics can be found in NSF’s recent annual report, FY 2013 Performance and Financial Highlights: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2014/nsf14003/nsf14003.pdf

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Announcements

Updates on NIH application due dates, project titles, Unicode characters, and more.

Application Due Dates and Weather

Federal staff are teleworking during inclement weather, help desks are open, grant application due dates are on and standard submission policies are in place. If  UGA organization is closed due to weather, you can submit on the first day it 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.  eRA systems will no longer truncate your project titles to 81 characters.

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, so that NIH will soon be able to recognize and store Greek and other scientific characters that systems can’t handle today.

Although Grants.gov limits the characters allowed in application form fields, you can  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 internal grants administration systems. Each of these systems will be updated over the Memorial Day weekend downtime.  Some adjustments to application due dates have been made to accommodate the downtime and to ensure all systems are ready to go (see NOT-OD-14-070).

Reference Letters & Fellowship Applications

Along with an upgrade to the latest OMB-approved application forms (FORMS-C), there was a change to 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. NIH is 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.

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Announcements
NIH grant application due dates that fall on or between May 25 and May 28, 2014 will move to May 29, 2014.
More information.
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NIH will open the Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR) for all Type 5 non-SNAP progress reports on April 25, 2014.

NIH requires use of the RPPR module to submit progress reports for Streamlined Non-competing Award Process (SNAP), fellowship, and multi-year funded awards.  NIH is continuing efforts to implement the RPPR module for non-SNAP awards. See details at (NOT-OD-14-064).

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Do you find yourself repeating the same NIH Guide search over and over again looking for funding opportunity announcements?  If the answer is yes, check out the new NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts. It allows you to be notified when new NIH Guide postings match your search criteria.  Just provide your email and the system will email you with new funding opportunity announcements and/or notices that interest you on a daily, weekly or monthly basis (your choice).

See a video explaining how to use it.

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New to the NIH grants process? Looking for some direction? A new YouTube video, The NIH Grants Process: the Big Picture, produced by the NIH Office of Extramural Research (OER), provides a high-level overview of the grants process from application to award.

As you begin to navigate the NIH grants process, be sure to bookmark grants.nih.gov for many more online resources. These include guidance on the various aspects of the grants process, podcasts, webinars, policy information, the NIH Guide to Grants and Contracts, and so much more. More videos related to NIH grants information may be also be found on on YouTube.

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A coalition of 14 business, higher education, and scientific organizations has  launched a creative video that urges Congress to Close the Innovation Deficit with strong federal investments in research and higher education.

The four-minute video, featuring rapidly hand-drawn images and text, can be viewed at www.innovationdeficit.org. It explains the direct link between basic research, economic growth, improved medical treatments, and national security; the risk that recent cuts to research pose to the United States’ role as the global innovation leader at a time when other nations are rapidly increasing their research investments; and the significant benefits that renewed investments in research would bring the country.

The innovation deficit is the gap between actual and needed federal investments in research and higher education at a time when other nations such as China, India and Singapore are dramatically boosting research funding to develop the next great technological and medical breakthroughs.

The Close the Innovation Deficit campaign is an effort by these and other organizations that are concerned about cuts and stagnating federal investments in research and higher education. The groups believe the U.S. must make strong and sustained investments in these areas to develop the people, ideas, and innovations needed to ensure that the U.S. maintains its role as global leader. These communities also believe that the growth supported by innovation will help address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems.

According to the National Science Board, the U.S. share of global R&D declined from 37 percent to 30 percent since 2001. During the same period, the economies of East and Southeast Asia and South Asia – including China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan – saw an increase in their combined share from 25 percent to 34 percent of the global total. The pace of growth over the past 10 years in China’s overall R&D remains exceptionally high at about 18 percent annually adjusted for inflation, propelling it to 14.5 percent of the global total in 2011, up from 2.2 percent in 2000.
In addition to the new video, the redesigned Close the Innovation Deficit website now features an array of compelling charts that detail the impact that U.S. cuts

The 14 organizations behind the Close the Innovation Deficit video are the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Council on Education (ACE), American Heart Association, Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), Council on Competitiveness (CoC), Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), Task Force on American Innovation (TFAI), The Science Coalition (TSC), and United for Medical Research (UMR).

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Research Announcements now includes links to a database of funding opportunities issued by government agencies in the last seven days.

Find Funding, located in the top right corner of the Research Announcements web page, includes links to the ITECS funding database listing funding opportunities from Air Force,  Army, DARPA,  DHS,  DoD,  DOE, DOT,  HHS, IARPA, NASA,  NIH, and NSF.

New opportunities are added to these links daily.

The Find Funding section also includes links to a list of other external funding resources and a link to Pivot, a subscription database of more than 25,000 funding opportunities from numerous sponsors across all disciplines. Users can create custom email funding alerts based on the their own criteria. Identified funding opportunities can be shared with targeted individuals and with groups, saved and tracked.

 

 

 

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As part of the release of the 2014 Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG) (NSF 14-1), all awardee organizations will be required to submit a Program Income Reporting Worksheet in Research.gov beginning March 1, 2014 in order to report the amount of program income earned and expended between October 1, 2012 and September 30, 2013. This first report will be due to NSF no later than March 31, 2014. Awardee organizations will subsequently be required to submit the Program Income Reporting Worksheet by October 31st each year to report the amount of program income earned and expended during the previous Federal fiscal year (October 1 – September 30). NSF policies related to program income can be found in Chapter III.D.4 of the Award and Administration Guide (AAG).

Program income is defined as gross income earned by the awardee organization that is directly generated by a supported activity or earned as a result of NSF-funding.  This includes but is not limited to fees for services performed, the use or rental of real or personal property acquired under the grant, the sale of commodities or items fabricated under the grant, and license fees. Interest earned on advances of Federal funds is not program income.

Research.gov is updated with a Program Income page, which contains additional information and the Program Income Reporting Worksheet. For assistance on completing the worksheet, please reference the Program Income Quick Reference Guide.

If you have any questions about this new reporting requirement, please contact your Grantee Cash Management Section (GCMS) accountant as listed at https://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dfm/cmeab.jsp.

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General policy notices from NIH.

Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Stipends, Tuition/Fees and Other Budgetary Levels Effective for Fiscal Year 2014

Notice establishing stipend levels for fiscal year (FY) 2014 Kirschstein-NRSA awards for undergraduate, predoctoral, and postdoctoral trainees and fellows.

Notice of Salary Limitation on Grants, Cooperative Agreements, and Contracts

Information regarding the salary limitation for NIH grant and cooperative agreement awards and extramural research and development contract awards.

Notice of Legislative Mandates in Effect for FY2014

The FY 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014 (Public Law 113-76) signed into law on January 17, 2014 provides funding to NIH for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2014. The intent of this Notice is to provide information on the following statutory provisions that limit the use of funds on NIH grant, cooperative agreement, and contract awards for FY2014.

See all NIH Policy notices and information.