Research Insights
Grants.gov Accepts Unicode in Free-text Form Fields, Effective Feb. 17
In May 2014, NIH and AHRQ databases were updated to support the collection of data using the full Unicode character set. This allowed eRA systems to accept Greek and other characters as they appeared in the original scientific text attachments included with applications. It also allowed these additional characters to be included in summary statements, progress reports and reporting systems. See NOT-OD-14-071.
However, at that time Grants.gov was unable to support the expanded character set. Consequently, applicants could use Unicode characters in their PDF attachments, but still could not use Greek and other special Unicode characters in the free-text form fields of their applications (e.g., project title, name, address, organization name, etc.).
As of February 17, 2015, Grants.gov forms and systems will also support Unicode characters.
Note: Grants.gov refers to their changes as ‘UTF-8 support’. UTF-8 is one standard for encoding the Unicode character set. Though the terms are different, the efforts provide the same benefit – support for the use of an expanded character set which includes the Greek and other characters and symbols often found in research documentation.