eRA Information: Ability for Users to Consolidate Multiple Commons Accounts Coming in Summer 2022

For those eRA Commons users who have multiple accounts in eRA Commons, we are pleased to let you know that a solution is coming soon that will allow you to consolidate those accounts and maintain one eRA Commons account going forward.  This is especially critical as we transition our external user community to require the use of two-factor authentication for accessing eRA Commons, ASSIST and IAR.

Some examples of users with multiple accounts are a person with a Signing Official and Principal Investigator accounts (typically small business applicants) or a person with Principal Investigator and Assistant accounts.

Note that users can choose to use either of the following two-factor authentication services:

• Login.gov and/or
• InCommon Federated accounts that support NIH’s two-factor authentication standards.

eRA only supports the ability to associate one Login.gov account to one eRA account, and we do not recommend using multiple Login.gov accounts to accommodate multiple eRA accounts; hence eRA recommended in September 2021 that users with multiple administrative Commons accounts hold off on moving to Login.gov until eRA had developed a solution for these users.

The capability to consolidate multiple Commons accounts will be available in summer 2022 and we strongly recommend that users request this consolidation once it is available. This will allow users to consolidate their multiple accounts into one eRA account that contains all their organization affiliations and roles in a single account.  Most importantly, once users complete the consolidation process, they will be able to associate their Login.gov or InCommon Federated account with one eRA account to support all their authentication needs. 

We will provide more information on the consolidation process as we get closer to the release date.

Resources

Access eRA Modules via Login.gov

Access eRA Modules via an InCommon Federated Account