eSubmission News and Updates
NIH eSubmission Items of Interest - Mar. 14, 2007
March 5 R01 Receipt Date Highlights
I figured you’d be curious to hear how everyone fared with the March 5 R01 receipt deadline. Despite a few challenges that raised anxiety levels – last minute patches for changes to Daylight Savings Time, application type terminology confusion to contend with and longer processing times due to multiple large agency opportunity closings at Grants.gov – we all managed to get the job done. Since the error-correction window for this deadline was extended from March 12 to today, March 14, there are still a few applicants finishing up the process, but the bulk of the applications are in.
Here are some of the highlights…
– We received just over 4,800 renewal (competing continuation), resubmission (amended), and revised (competing supplement) R01 research grant applications for the March 5 deadline. NIH planned for 4,500-5,000 applications, so the number of applications received is right within the expected range.
– Once again, the applicant community proved to be well-prepared. By March 4, NIH had already received over 3175 error-free applications. Applicants submitted applications that were highly compliant with NIH business rules; 64% submitted an error-free application on the first attempt and 90% submitted an error-free application within two attempts.
– System-to-system transfer of application data continues to rise. Over 14% of the error-free applications received used system-to-system transmissions (up from 10% in February). For system-to-system transmissions: 76% of the error-free submissions were received on the first attempt and 94% were received within two attempts. System-to-system solutions are developed by institutions or purchased from commercial service providers as a means to submit just the application data elements directly to Grants.gov rather than using the actual application forms packages.
– Although most applications were processed well within Grants.gov’s 48 hour target, processing times were considerably longer than applicants experienced in February. The longer processing times caused some applicants to re-submit their applications prior to receiving the results of their original submissions, thus adding to system load. Status requests also increased at the Grants.gov Customer Care Center and the eRA Commons Helpdesk affecting both teams ability to address applicant concerns in a timely manner. NIH extended the five business day error-correction window by two business days to accommodate the subset of applicants that did not have sufficient time to correct applications due to Grants.gov processing times in excess of 48 hours.
– Once Grants.gov completed its application processing, eRA was able to perform its own validation process and make the application status available to applicants very quickly (less than 4 minutes on average).
– Overall, application size was down slightly from February, but the receipt of a 91.7MB file brought the average size up to 5.8MB (February average 4.8MB).
– A new system usage record was set on March 5 with 23,877 eRA Commons logins, breaking the previous record of 19,283 eRA Commons logins set on Feb. 5.
Good job, everyone!
Sheri Cummins
Communications Coordinator
NIH Electronic Submission of Grant Applications
