Lessons Learned from the June NIH deadlines

As many of you know, there are “high seasons” for proposal volume and June and July certainly fall in this category.

June proposals in numbers:

  • BU Sponsored Programs processed over 220 proposals in June.
  • Proposals submitted directly to NIH for the R01, R03, R21 deadlines = 92
  • Percentage of proposals finalized and submitted one day or less before the R01, R03, R21 deadlines = 55 (60%)

Lessons Learned:

  • The high volume of proposals compounded with the high rate of last minute submissions means these proposals are not getting a thorough review. Major and minor items can be missed because of the rush to submit on time. These must be corrected prior to acceptance of award.
  • Please be sure all signature approvals are collected on the PSF, particularly if there is a cost-share proposed. We hold proposals until these approvals are received which is added stress for all if the proposal is received on the day of submission.
  • The risk of validation/submission issues greatly increases as the 5pm deadline approaches. Remember, the entire country is trying to submit through the same system, once the West coast business day starts the capacity of grants.gov and eRA commons is tested. These sites have crashed on deadline day.
    • On the June R01 deadline this year two proposals submitted after 3pm ET on deadline day took 3 hours to validate, meaning we could not confirm a successful submission or view the proposals in eRA commons before the 5pm deadline.
  • We often receive requests to “correct” NIH proposals after the application has been successfully been submitted. Please know this is not a trivial thing to do, especially if we receive the request on the day of the deadline. We must reject the previous application, have the correction made, and then resubmit the proposal. The application then has to go through the whole electronic grants.gov and eRA commons validation process again. If this second validation process does not clear by 5pm on deadline day, you run the risk of the proposal not being accepted by the funding agency. We do not recommend pulling a successfully submitted grant on the deadline day to make corrections, but if it is important enough to the PI to fix, this should be a known and measured risk they take as we cannot guarantee a successful resubmission.

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