Grants Training Reminder | eRA Commons downtime and ASSIST update planned | NIH Closed January 20 - Inauguration Day

MU Grants Community,
Please see below for important information and share as applicable.

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Seats remain available for the first Certificate Series session of 2017! Join us for Fundamentals of Sponsored Programs tomorrow Wednesday, January 18, from 8:30 to 10:30am in Memorial Union. Register here: https://apps.orcs.missouri.edu/ospa_training/.

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­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ Inauguration Day (January 20, 2017) Impact on NIH Grant Application Due Dates and Support
(NOT-OD-17-033) National Institutes of Health

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eRA Enhancements: eRA Commons Upcoming Release and Scheduled Downtime for Wednesday, January 18
Friday, January 13, 2017

Scheduled Downtime for the January Release:
eRA Commons and ASSIST will be unavailable beginning at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday, January 18 and will return to service by 7 a.m. ET Thursday, January 19, 2017. When the system is available again, you will see new features and functionality have been added to the system.

Highlights of ASSIST’s January Software Release

eRA Reminder: Please Update Your Browsers by Nov. 30 to Continue Using eRA Modules

eRA Reminder: Please Update Your Browsers by Nov. 30 
Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Just a reminder that on Wednesday, November 30, 2016, eRA is updating access to all its publicly-accessible websites to use ‘https only’ secure connections per federal mandate (OMB M-15-13, dated June 8, 2015). Please update your browsers to continue using eRA Commons, ASSIST, IAR and iEdison.

NOTE: This update will not impact System-to-System connections or security certificates. 

Original message below sent Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 8:26 a.m. ET. 

Grant Connections | January 2016 Meeting Notes

Notes from the January Grant Connections meeting are included below for your review and reference.

Grant Connections - January 2016

Wednesday, January 27, 2016
11:00 a.m. – noon
Room 572 of the Bond Life Sciences Center

Agenda

• Hot Topics
• Preparing and Submitting your NIH Grant Application. Up first in a new Grant Connections discussion series on common proposal submission issues, Brenda Leuenberger from OSPA will share "Questions, Quirks, and reQuests: AKA Errors and Warnings and Calls from your SGCA” for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant applications through Grants.gov and the eRA Commons. 
• Rigor and Transparency. NIH has implemented changes relating to rigor and transparency “to enhance the reproducibility of research findings,” effective for most applications with due dates on or after January 25, 2016 (NOT-OD-16-11). We will review the new requirements for proposals and post-award administration related to compliance with this policy. 

Mark your calendars! Meetings are scheduled for the following dates.

• February 24, 2016
• March 23, 2016
• April 27, 2016
• May 25, 2016

Grant Connections Organizational Crew (send your suggestions for future topics to these people)

• Liz Bent, Grants & Contracts Administrator, CAFNR 
• Marty Carter, Senior Business Operations Associate, School of Medicine 
• Brandi Clements, Grants & Contracts Administrator, College of Education 
• Craig David, Director, OSPA 
• Jill Ferguson, Senior Compliance Manager, OSPA 
• Sheryl Koenig, Grant Proposal Manager, Bond Life Sciences Center 
• Julia Rodriguez, Grants & Contracts Administrator, Bond Life Sciences Center 
• Jamie Szabo, Senior Compliance Manager, OSPA 

Please share this information anyone else associated with research who you think might be interested in attending.

NIH Notices: Current Forms | eRA Service Desk | Prior Approval Rules for Human Subjects Research Awards

MU Grants Community,

Please see the following NIH Notices: 

• OMB Approval for Form Changes Underway - Continue to Use Current Forms Until Further Notice (NOT-OD-15-146)
  Until further notice, applicants and grantees must continue to use the current agency-specific forms listed in this Notice despite the expiration date of August 31, 2015. NIH is authorized to continue to use the current forms while working with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to obtain approval for form updates. Once OMB approval is in place, NIH will provide information on data collection changes and implementation plans.

• eRA Commons Help Desk Rebranded as eRA Service Desk (NOT-OD-15-147)
  The eRA Commons Help Desk has been rebranded as the eRA Service Desk to reflect the team’s expansion to support ASSIST and other eRA services in addition to eRA Commons.

• Guidance on Changes That Involve Human Subjects in Active Awards and That Will Require Prior NIH Approval: Updated Notice (NOT-OD-15-128)
  Provides detailed guidance on the types of changes in human subjects research awards that will require prior NIH approval and provides information on the process for submission of such requests. 
• Prior NIH Approval of Human Subjects Research in Active Awards Initially Submitted without Definitive Plans for Human Subjects Involvement (Delayed Onset Awards): Updated Notice (NOT-OD-15-129)
  Clarifies NIH requirements related to prior NIH approval of human subjects research plans for awards which were submitted with the intent to conduct human subjects research during the period of support, but for which definitive plans could not be described in the grant application. 

Should you have questions about the applicability of these policies to current or anticipated projects, please contact your OSPA pre-award or post-award staff.

Notice to NIH Grant Applicants: eRA Information: Proactively Check Status of Application in eRA Commons

MU Grants Community, 

Please see the following alert from NIH issued Tuesday, February 3, 2015. OSPA checks the application status upon submission; however, as NIH suggests below, we also encourage PIs and Departmental Research Administrators to do the same. 

eRA Information: Proactively Check Status of Application in eRA Commons 

It has come to our attention that some notifications, sent upon application submission, are not being delivered to the email addresses listed on the SF424 R&R cover form of the application. 

We are looking into the issue and will send an update once we have resolved it.

Meanwhile, we encourage Principal Investigators and Signing Officials to proactively check the status of their submitted grant application in eRA Commons.

eRA Communications

Division of Communications and Outreach

NIH Office of Extramural Research

Questions? Please contact the eRA Help Desk. Check out self-help resources on the Help page before submitting an online ticket; or call Toll-free: 1-866-504-9552, Phone: 301-402-7469.  Help Desk hours are Mon-Fri, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET

NIH Grantees: Disregard Reference to Form 2590 in Reminders for Non-SNAP Reports

The following notice was issued by the eRA Division of Communication and Outreach on Wednesday, October 29, 2014.

All Non-SNAP progress reports submitted on or after October 17, 2014 are required to be submitted using the Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR) format, per Guide Notices NOT-OD-14-092 and NOT-OD-15-014,

Please disregard the language in the Progress Report Reminder email notifications that references using form PHS 2590 - Grant Progress Report.  We will be updating the language in the reminder notifications, in a future release, to correctly reflect the requirement to use RPPR for all Non-SNAP progress reports.

We are sorry for any inconvenience it may cause.

eRA Communications

Division of Communications and Outreach

NIH Office of Extramural Research

Should you have questions, please contact your OSPA Pre-Award or Post-Award staff.

eRA Information: Quick Queries are Moving in November

The following alert was issued by the Division of Communication and Outreach on Thursday, October 23, 2014.

Quick Queries are a series of search tools designed to help find important information concerning your NIH awarded grant(s) without the need for having an eRA Commons account. There are currently four query options available on the eRA Commons Quick Queries page:

• Commons Registered Organizations
• Progress Report Search by IPF number
• IPF Number Search 
• Issued Notice of (Grant) Award 

In late November, these queries will all be moving to the eRA Commons system. You will be able to access all the queries from the eRA Commons home page (no log in required) using Commons Quick Queries link under Additional Links along the right side of the page. This move will result in a change in the URLs for each tool. If you have any of the tools bookmarked, please note that after the update the URL will no longer function and you will need to bookmark the new URLs.

NIH eRA Items of Interest - September 11, 2014

The following Items of Interest notice was issued by the eRA Division of Communication and Outreach on Thursday, September 11, 2014:

Take Notice!

If there is one concept that we are reminded about daily and that we try to remind you about, it is that the grant application and award process is complex.  Part of what makes it so complex is that it is highly dynamic; ever changing, adjusting and adapting to political, economic, and technological forces.  As a result we need to communicate critical changes with regards to processes and policy to you.  We accomplish this through a variety of the methods, such as Items of Interest newsletters (eRA and eSubmission), the Extramural Nexus, Dr. Rockey’s Rock Talk blog, etc.

The most formal method of communication is via Guide Notices.  Guide Notices (NOT) are official NIH announcements relating to a change in policy, procedure, form, or system.  Notices can be searched for at the NIH Guide.  And searches can be subscribed to via the recently added subscription service. Watch this tutorial to learn more about the subscribe feature.

You may wish to take note of these recent and/or important notices:

eRA Alert: System Issue Affecting Submissions to NIH

The following alert was issued by the eRA Division of Communication and Outreach on Monday, September 8, 2014:

The NIH eRA team is seeing an unusually high number of applications encountering ‘System Issues’ upon submission . If you encounter a system issue that impacts your ability to submit on time, please refrain from submitting again and follow our standard Guidelines for Applicants Experiencing System Issues for guidance.

The NIH eRA Production Support team is proactively identifying and reprocessing applications that encounter system issues. Applications are typically identified and reprocessed within 2 hours of submission. Due to this reprocessing, you may see subsequent email notifications for the same application. You will know the application has reprocessed successfully if you receive a notification indicating you should check your application in eRA Commons, you can access a list of errors/warnings in eRA Commons for your submission or if you can access your application image in eRA Commons.