ADDITIONAL BEST PRACTICES
Ready to Finalize?
We receive requests to reject and resubmit about 1 out of every 4 proposals from the eRA Commons for NIH submissions. The most common reasons are:
- Typos
- Margin issues
- Attachments in the wrong order
- Misaligned figures
Due to the fact that many of these happen in the last days of the deadline (which has the potential to result in a missed deadline if the proposal has a glitch on the resubmission), below is a quick guide to reviewing the assembled proposal for “easy fixes” prior to any submission.
Once you have uploaded all your attachments to the 424:
- Enter the eRPM system and find the record for the proposal
- Choose Grants.gov for 13-PAFXXXX on the left side of the eRPM home screen.
- From the next screen menu on the left side, choose Validate the proposal
- Choose Generate PDF from the menu on the left to create the final PDF
- At the top of the page, next to “PDF Version:” you will now see a new hyperlink on the word View
- You may download the PDF and email to the PI* OR the PI may click on the hyperlink to view the fully assembled proposal directly in eRPM
- After review, correct any issues, re-validate, and re-generate the PDF
- Finalize the proposal using the eRPM activity on the PAF home page as usual
Finalizing the proposal triggers submission to NIH by the Grants Office. Please do not finalize until you are positive you are ready to submit.
This will reduce the number of proposals that are pulled back from the Commons after submission for correction of errors by approximately 65% and remove the additional concern that a resubmission may not submit in time for the deadline.
Effective July 2012
Counting Pages
Many proposals receive warnings or errors due to page limits. For example, the Research Strategy section of most NIH proposals is limited to 12 pages. When the proposal’s final PDF is created (showing how it will be received by Commons) it may reach 15 pages because of added white space at the bottom of pages that is inserted as component pages are separated. When the final PDF of the proposal is viewed it may be difficult to count the pages because of this added white space.
The following suggestion aims to allow you to feel confident that the page limit is not exceeded in these instances.
- Create all of the component documents in one Microsoft Word file
- Finalize the component pages
- Separate the components into their own PDF files
- Upload the individual PDFs to the 424 application
Effective July 2012