eSubmission News and Updates
NIH eSubmission Items of Interest — June 1, 2007
Submission Deadline for New R01s is June 5
Grants.gov and NIH are ready to receive your new R01 applications for the June 5 submission deadline. We anticipate processing delays on and around June 5 due to large application volume, but processing should remain well within Grants.gov’s 48 hour and NIH’s 1 business day processing targets. For a point of reference, during our last standard R01 submission date (March 5), the median time from submission to Grants.gov to response from NIH was about 10 hours. Grants.gov has posted alerts in the upper left corner of their homepage and on their Technical Alert page at http://www.grants.gov/aboutgrants/technical_alerts.jsp.
Remember, NIH uses the timestamp provided by Grants.gov at time of submission to document on-time application submission. Please resist the temptation to resubmit your application with changes or corrections until your initial submission has completed processing. The five business day window to correct NIH system-identified errors/warnings is still in effect (assumes registrations are complete and initial submission was on time). So, you have plenty of time to allow processing to complete and then address any errors/warnings.
Mac Users
Grants.gov has posted a new version of the IBM Workplace Forms (PureEdge) Viewer for Macintosh users on their download software page (note the release notes have not changed). The new version addresses the issues associated with using the viewer in conjunction with the recent Mac security upgrade (2007-004 v1.0 and v1.1). Kudos to Grants.gov and IBM for their quick turnaround on both the workaround and this new viewer version!
Viewing Window & Federal Holidays
We have re-evaluated the inclusion of Federal holidays in the two-day application viewing window used by SOs and PIs to confirm proper assembly of applications in the eRA Commons. Although NIH has a receipt date for some opportunity nearly every business day, the close proximity of the July 4th holiday to our July 5th R01 receipt date (one of our largest receipt dates of the year) has really brought this issue to a head. For the Memorial Day holiday we tried a short term workaround to bypass the holiday and we will use a similar solution for the coming July 4th holiday. We did learn some lessons from the Memorial Day “proof of concept” and we are better positioned to handle the July 4th holiday. We realize that implementing the change for Memorial Day was last minute and did lead to some confusion. We appreciate your continued patience as we work to improve the long term process. A notice will be placed in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts in the next few weeks to provide more specifics regarding our plans in this area. Stay tuned!
Sheri Cummins
Communications
Coordinator
NIH Electronic Submission of Grant Applications
Contractor, LTS
