Organizational Hierarchy - There are four basic organizational levels: institution, school, division, and department. Although the NIH has developed standards to index by institution and school, division and department are in non-standard plain text. A method of auto-indexing these subordinate levels must be developed.

Institutional Reporting Requirements - Respondents want the ability to query all fields in the database that will allow them to survey the status of all pending applications and awards to their institution (in the case of NIH Commons users, the S.O. or A.O. type), or for only their own application and award(s) (in the case of NIH Commons PI users). Other reports pertaining to use of the Commons by institutional staff also were requested. Based on the organization hierarchy described above, CWG members indicated a desire to restrict report accessibility to data in the user's own department, rather than to the entire institution.

Single Point of Data Ownership - Functionality should be added to IMPAC II, the NIH enterprise-level grants administration system, that will enable PIs to delegate authority for updating their profile information. PIs will still be responsible for the accuracy of this information. The Commons profile system must allow interaction with third-party software such as Community of Science (COS), ScienceWise, and university systems.

Institutional Approvals - It is not feasible to incorporate workflow into the Commons software. The existing approach that allows for routing and approval of applications prior to formal submission to the NIH will be enhanced to enable customization of user rights within a role type through the use of a "rights menu."

DUNS Numbers Update - The CWG endorsed Dr. Stone's proposal for using the Dun & Bradstreet Universal Number System (DUNS) as successor to Institutional Profile File (IPF) identifiers for NIH grantee organizations.

As the population of grantee organizations increases, the number of available 7-digit IPF combinations is becoming limited. Within the year, it will be necessary to move to an 8-digit IPF, a difficult transition involving extensive software implementation changes. The IPF system also lacks the flexibility and universality to serve the NIH grantee community efficiently as the NIH moves forward with participation in the trans-governmental Federal Commons electronic grants administration.

The 9-digit DUNS numbers are the standard for all U.S. Federal Government electronic commerce transactions. If implemented by the Commons, each institution would use a single DUNS number for grant submissions to the NIH. The membership decided that the 4-digit extension to DUNS numbers should not be used to identify institutional hierarchies.

For additional information, see the eRA white paper entitled "Proposed Implementation of the DUNS Number as a Unique Identifier for NIH Grantee Organizations."