eRA eSubmission Items of Interest
eRA eSubmission Items of Interest - January 7, 2009
View Your Submission Status and Assembled Application in eRA Commons
I can’t remember the last time I’ve written Items of Interest and didn’t stress one of the following tips for successful application submission…
- Don’t wait until the last minute; leave enough time to address unforeseen issues.
- Read and follow all opportunity announcement and application guide instructions.
- Track your application all the way through to an assembled application image in eRA Commons – If you can’t view it, we can’t review it!
- Report to the eRA Commons Help Desk any issues (even if you are already working with Grants.gov) that threaten your ability to submit your application on time.
Today is no exception. If you are submitting to the January 7 submission deadline for AIDS and AIDS-related applications, hopefully you already have your error-free application sitting in the PD/PI’s Commons account and, after a careful check of the entire assembled application image, you are sitting back congratulating yourselves on a job well done.
However, if you still have submissions to make, here’s another good reason to follow those tips…
Grants.gov is currently investigating an issue that has caused
some applicants to receive conflicting status notifications for
their submissions.
Grants.gov has described the symptoms as follows:
- An application will become stalled in the system
- Not being accepted the first time, the system will attempt to resubmit the application as many as ten times
- In the best of cases, the application will be accepted the second time - meaning, the applicant will receive one rejection notice, then an acceptance email
- In the worst of cases, an applicant might receive up to ten rejection emails before receiving an acceptance email
- Confounding the worst case scenario, the emails might not be sent in an orderly manner - meaning that an applicant could receive seven rejection notices, then an acceptance email, followed by two rejection notices
Grants.gov is working hard to address this issue. In the meantime, here are some steps you should take if you receive a rejection notice for your submission…
- Carefully review your application to make certain there are no legitimate errors. An erroneous rejection notice looks just like a real one.
- If you can’t identify a legitimate reason for the rejection notice, call the Grants.gov Contact Center for advice and to document your issue. Also notify the eRA Commons Help Desk if your issues threaten on-time submission. Help Desk Contact Information
- Keep your rejection and acceptance notices as further documentation of your submission.
- Use eRA Commons to track the status of your submission and to view your assembled application.
- Look for and correct any errors identified by the eRA system.
- If you submit your application again before the prior submission is pulled from Grants.gov and processed by the agency, there is no guarantee that your submissions will reach the agency in order. Give each submission a chance to complete the submission process before retrying and make sure your final application image properly reflects your most recent submission.
- Viewing your assembled application in Commons is the ONLY way to be certain it has properly reached NIH and is available for further consideration!
eRA Commons Release Coming Soon!
Stay tuned…information on new eRA Commons features & fixes to be released later this month will be heading your way in the next few days.
Sheri Cummins & Scarlett Gibb
Customer Relationship Managers
eSubmisssion and eRA Commons
NIH Office of Extramural Research
askera@mail.nih.gov
