Notice Number: NOT-OD-09-127

Key Dates
Release Date:  July 23, 2009

Issued by
National Institutes of Health (NIH), (http://www.nih.gov)

Background & Purpose: 

When NIH issues a Notice of Award (NoA), the official document is made available to grantee officials and corresponding Program Directors/Principal Investigators through the eRA Commons.  The eRA Commons is the official repository for this document.  As part of the NoA process, NIH has continued the practice of notifying the grantee via e-mail address when an award has been issued.

The purpose of this Guide Notice is to notify the grantee community that in recent months NIH has determined that the email notification system can be improved to ensure that email notifications are consistently and correctly sent.

Actions Being Taken:

While implementing this improvement, NIH determined that certain NoA notifications were not initially sent to the grantee.  For those in this category since July 1, 2009, NIH has regenerated these notifications and sent them to the grantee.  Please note that the delayed sending of NoA email notification does not affect the original content (e.g., award date, dollars awarded, etc) or their posting in the eRA Commons. 

System improvements will be implemented over the course of the next few months by the eRA Team.  A partial system improvement will be released on July 24, 2009 and the final improvement will be made in October 2009.  An automated notification monitoring system will also be put in place in October to ensure that any NoA notification errors are addressed in a timely manner.  In the meantime, eRA staff will perform daily, manual checks to identify any notification anomalies and regenerate NoA notifications as needed.

Signing Officials (SOs) can also assist in this improvement effort by ensuring that the NoA email address recorded in the Institutional Profile for your institution is kept current.  SOs can edit the award email field by following the instructions provided in the Editing Institutional Profile Information link in the eRA Commons.  Grantee institutions are strongly encouraged to use a unique email address that is not specific to an individual to avoid notification problems when personnel change.  The organization is responsible for maintaining an accurate NoA email address.

Ways to Identify Issues NoAs:

In addition to the email notifications, grantees are reminded that there are other ways to check for recently issues awards within the eRA System:

• Use the public Issued Notice of (Grant) Award (http://era.nih.gov/commons/quick_queries/NIH_issued-NGAs.cfm) query on the eRA Web site to general a list of awards issued to your organization over a selected period.  You will need to know your organization’s Institution Profile File (IPF) Number in order to use this query.  Your IPF number can be found by logging into Commons and accessing the Basic information section of your organization’s Institution Profile or you can use the public IPF Number Search query to obtain the number.
• Use the Recently Awarded search option in eRA Commons status to identify the list of awards matching your search criteria.  You must have an eRA Commons account with a Signing Official (SO) or Administrative Official (AO) role to use this feature.

Inquiries

Inquiries concerning this Notice may be directed to:

eRA Commons Help Desk
Web: http://ithelpdesk.nih.gov/eRA/
Toll-free: 1-866-504-9552
Phone: 301-402-7469
TTY: 301-451-5939
Hours: Mon-Fri, 7a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Time

Weekly TOC for this Announcement
NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices

	Office of Extramural Research (OER)			National Institutes of Health (NIH) 9000 Rockville Pike Bethesda, Maryland 20892			Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
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