Office of Research and Project Administration

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has confirmed that Research Project Grant (R01) applications for the February 5, 2007 deadline must be submitted electronically through Grants.gov.  In anticipation of this submission deadline, NIH in cooperation with Grants.gov has initiated a variety of changes to assist the applicant community in a successful transition to electronic submission.  The most recent edition of the NIH Extramural Nexus newsletter outlines those changes and offers helpful links to resources for investigators and administrators.  This special issue of Nexus is available at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/partners/1106Nexus.htm or through the NIH Electronic Submission web site (under eSubmission News) at: http://era.nih.gov/ElectronicReceipt/
Research administrators may want to distribute this special edition of the NIH Extramural Nexus as a reminder to their investigators of changes in deadlines and processes for applications. 
 
Highlights: 
 
February 5, 2007 Deadline:  NIH has shifted all the application deadline dates to help manage the volume of applications submitted through Grants.gov. 
 
NIH will NOT penalize applicants for Grants.gov or eRA Commons System Problems:  NIH describes the process for reporting problems with submissions and how it will communicate any extensions of deadlines because of Grants.gov system problems and any extension of the eRA Commons error-correction validation windows because of NIH system problems.
 
"Parent Announcement" for R01:  The R01 Parent Announcement for applications is available and should be used for the February 5 deadline.  Accessing the announcement ensures that investigators are using the correct forms for their submission.  As you know, there are currently two versions of the Grants.gov SF 424 R&R in use.  It is important that investigators begin preparing their applications with the correct forms. 
 
MAC Options:  Grants.gov has posted an early-release of the IBM Workplace Forms (PureEdge) viewer for Macintosh users.  There are limitations to its use but it is an additional tool for non-Windows based applicants.