Recruitment Phase

The SRO* responsible for conducting the review meeting is required to select and assign reviewers for each application in the meeting. These reviewers must not have any real or apparent conflicts of interest (COI) with the applications they are reviewing. A COI in scientific peer review exists when a reviewer has an interest in or an association with a person involved with a grant, a cooperative agreement application, or an R&D contract proposal that is likely to cause a bias within the evaluation. If a reviewer has a conflict of interest with an application, they may not participate in its review.

For this reason, the Recruitment Phase was created. In the Recruitment Phase, potential reviewers are given access to view a list of involved personnel for a meeting and to self-identify any Conflicts of Interest before being selected as reviewers in those meetings.

TIP: The NIH Conflict of Interest, Confidentiality, and Non Disclosure Rules can be accessed online at the following location: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/peer/COI_Information.pdf.
You may also review the Refer to Certifying Conflicts of Interest topic in this online guide.

The Recruitment Phase is an optional phase enabled at the discretion of the SRO, usually ending with the start of the meeting or selection of a reviewer for the Submit Phase. The SRO invites the potential reviewers to participate in the Recruitment Phase, and when enabled for it, the reviewers are notified via an email invitation. In this phase, potential reviewers self-identify any COIs before being selected as reviewers and being given access to applications in the meeting.

When a potential reviewer is enabled by an SRO to participate in the Recruitment Phase of a meeting, the reviewer is notified of this invitation by email. The email sent to a reviewer differs depending on the status of the reviewer’s eRA Commons account.

Recruitment Phase Workflow Summary:

• Respond to the email invitation from SRO
• Create an eRA Commons account to access IAR (This is a one-time function. Do not create a new account if you already have an existing account.)
• Access the IAR List of Meetings screen
• Electronically sign the Confidentiality Agreement and indicate Federal Lobbyist status
• Electronically sign the Employment Certificationto indicate your employment status with the federal government
• Examine assigned applications to determine/disclose any conflicts of interest (COI) and determine if the assignments are appropriate for your expertise
• Electronically sign the Pre-Meeting COI Certification
• Access the applications electronically
• Refer to the Reviewer's Workflow for subsequent steps performed in other phases of the meeting

TIP: *Other Transaction Authority (OTA) - Some screens and terminology may be different in order to accommodate review of OTA, a type of award that is neither a grant nor a contract but a different way of funding that is used across NIH. These changes will typically not be visible to NIH or agency reviewers.