Research Insights

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.