Grants.Gov Information
NIH-Specific Issues
NIH Specific Issues in GRANTS.GOV Submission
Applying to NIH through Grants.gov is more complicated than applications to other agencies. Here are some major differences NIH applicants should be aware of:
- You
must be registered with a user name in the NIH Commons in order to
apply. Your Sponsored Program Administrator (SPA) can verify your user
status and register you.
- The PI’s Commons User ID must be entered onto the Senior/Key Person Form in the field credential/agency login. THIS FIELD IS NOT HIGHLIGHTED IN YELLOW. Hopefully that will be fixed for future competitions.
- There
are now distinct application packages for each of the standard NIH
funding mechanisms, (R01, R03, K award, etc). You can find them all here.
- If
you respond to an RFA, follow the link within the RFA (also known in
grants.gov lingo as a Funding Opportunity Announcement or FOA) to find
the forms specific to the announcement.
- NIH
still requires each collaborating/subcontracting to submit a separate
detailed budget on NIH Budget forms. These forms are embedded within
each individual application package and require the additional step of
extracting the forms from the package and emailing them to your
collaborator.
- A signed face page from each subcontractor is no longer a required component of the proposal submission.
However, a signed face sheet or letter of commitment from an authorized
institutional official agreeing to participate in the project and carry
out all programmatic, fiscal and regulatory requirements must be
received and retained by OSP during the internal approval process. PIs
will want to include such a letter as an appendix to the proposal in
any case.
- In
the absence of a physical letter, we will accept an email from an
institutional official with a subcontract budget and justification
attached.
- Indirect
Costs are no longer included on a checklist page. Each subcontractor
will include an indirect cost line within its budget. On projects
where TC is the lead, our budget will include a line for indirect costs
from each of our collaborators in addition to the line for our own
IDC.
Avoiding problems at submission time:
- Grants.gov
is, at least theoretically, completely integrated with the NIH
Commons. Information in a Grants.gov application is checked against
information on file in the Commons at submission. Discrepancies
between the data in each system can lead to errors, most of which,
unfortunately, cannot be foreseen prior to submission.
- Once
we submit a proposal, we receive a series of emails, first from
Grants.gov confirming the proposal was submitted and a second
confirming it meets grants.gov submission standards and has been
forward to the agency for retrieval. Then we receive a confirmation
that the agency has retrieved the proposal and finally an email that
either gives us an agency tracking number or informs us of errors in
the submission.
- Commons
error messages contain either ERRORS, which must be corrected
immediately before the proposal can be reviewed, or WARNINGS, which
indicate minor discrepancies between the application and our
institutional or PI profiles in the Commons. WARNINGS do not need to
be corrected prior to review, but may require clarification during the
review or award stage.
- ERRORS that are not corrected prior to the deadline date and time will result in a LATE submission. This is the main reason we need to be firm on the “12noon day before funder’s deadline” internal deadline. Proposals with errors corrected after 5 pm on the deadline date may still be accepted, but we will need to add a letter explaining why the proposal is late.