AAMC Reporter: April 2007

First R01s Roll in to Grants.gov

In June 2006, paper grant applications piled up in the NIH Center for Scientific Review mailroom. Most NIH applications will be submitted electronically by the end of 2007.

February 5, 5 p.m. was a zero hour of sorts for researchers throughout the nation's academic medical centers. That was the moment at which the National Institutes of Health (NIH) accepted final grant submissions for its winter cycle—ordinarily not groundbreaking, but this batch was a little different. It included the first round of NIH R01 grant applications submitted electronically via Grants.gov under new NIH requirements.

The Grants.gov Web site is designed to facilitate the federal grants process. Managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, this portal offers electronic applications for more than $400 billion in federal grants. Since 2005, NIH has gradually been converting from an entirely paper-based grant system to this fully electronic one.

The system had undergone a test run back in June of 2006, when the first sets of grants mandated for electronic submission went in. But these, including R03s (small grants) and R23s (exploratory/developmental grants), do not account for nearly the volume represented by R01s, the NIH's primary investigator-led research grant mechanism.

The questions were common:Would the system hold? Would an unwieldy number of grants be rejected for not meeting technical requirements? Would frantic investigators, accustomed to controlling application paperwork until the final entrustment to a mail delivery truck, be able to safely hand over their submissions to administrators?

Preliminary data from the NIH's Office of Extramural Research, and early reactions from AAMC member medical schools, seem to indicate that, so far, every question has found a ready answer. "I have not heard a single complaint," said Tony Mazzaschi, AAMC senior associate vice president for research.

NIH planned to receive between 4,500 and 5,000 R01 applications at the Feb. 5 deadline, and received a slightly smaller number—approximately 4,000. A record number of these, nearly 3,000, were submitted before the grant deadline. Some 70 percent submitted error-free applications on the first try, and 94 percent submitted an error-free application within two attempts. The NIH's Electronic Research Administration (eRA) system held up well under a record-breaking 19,283 log-ins on Feb. 5. Help-desk average wait times remained under three minutes.

The surprisingly smooth transition can probably be credited to extensive preparation by university grants offices, said Charles Moldow, M.D., vice dean for research and operations at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

"People were very nervous, and they expected Armageddon, and they prepared for it," he said. At Minnesota, as at many other medical schools, the grants and contracts office instituted a submission deadline five days in advance of the official NIH deadline to ensure a smooth first experience. "That early deadline helped, as did the fact that our grants managers met monthly with dean's office personnel and sponsored projects personnel to prepare," Moldow said.

At the University of Michigan Medical School, the electronic submission process moved smoothly, according to Robert Beattie, the school's Grants.gov liaison. Beattie praised the NIH's response to needs identified by users as a major reason for improvements in the process. Overall, of 70 electronic applications from Michigan, only about 10 or 15 had errors that led NIH administrators to require a resubmission. Submission numbers were fairly similar at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, which sent in 62 grants to the NIH (out of a total of 103 submissions to Grants.gov that week, including Department of Defense and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submissions).

"We had one person who didn't make the deadline because of a laptop crash, but that could have just as easily happened with a paper submission. Everyone else got in and got in on time," said Jane Fant, assistant vice president for sponsored programs administration and the director of the Office of Grants and Contracts Administration for UAB. "The last one went in five minutes before the Grants.gov deadline, but they all got in. In general, we had more than 90 percent compliance from the faculty for our new deadlines: 10 days before Grants.gov's deadline for [budget and other administrative data] and three days before the deadline for a complete application that included all the scientific data. That gave us the opportunity to work closely with people who were having difficulty."

Not surprisingly, several institutions reported that they had had a smaller overall number of R01s to submit than expected, as some investigators most likely either rushed their grants for submission prior to the advent of the electronic system, or decided to wait until the first round of R01s had gone through under the new system.

"We had 35 proposals submitted, which is low for that deadline. We had a very busy fall—I think people tried to avoid it if they could—although at least two people I know deliberately submitted in February because they expected the numbers would be low," said Moldow. "The next go-round, I expect that more proposals will be submitted."

For many academic medical centers, the process has represented a significant cultural change. "What I'm hearing from our staff is that the Grants.gov process is much more mentally demanding, whereas the paper process is much more physically demanding," Beattie observed. "In the new system, we don't have to make 25 copies, haul them around, put them in boxes, make and track labels, and so on. But we have to keep our eyes on the e-mails that are coming in, track the applications' progress through e-mails, and redo applications so that principal investigators can fix things they want changed."

"It's a much more collaborative process now," said Moldow. "Investigators can't just walk into the grants office the day before the deadline, throw the grant on someone's desk and say, 'Here you are.' They need to work much more closely with their local grants management expert."

And the change is not complete yet. In addition to probable increases in overall submission numbers at the next R01 deadline (June 5), there will be a new Grants.gov system—this one designed by General Dynamics to be compatible with all platforms, including Windows, Macintosh, Unix, and Linux. Northrop Grumman, which created the original Grants.gov site, saw its contract expire in November 2006; General Dynamics had been announced as the new provider, with a one-year contract, in September.With more change in the works, many of the academic medical centers that have implemented early NIH submission deadlines are not talking about rolling them back just yet.

"We hope that the changes in Grants.gov are behind the scenes so that it works the same way as it did—people don't need constant change," said Fant. "We want to leave our early deadlines in place until the system settles down to software everyone knows, and everyone has had a couple of submission cycles to get used to it."

—By Gina Shaw, special to the Reporter

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