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Electronic Submission of Grant Applications

Introduction

Since 2005, NIH has been receiving applications electronically through Grants.gov, the fed-wide portal for finding and applying for grants. eRA systems interact with Grant.gov to complete application processing for our partner agencies.

What does electronic submission involve?

  • Applicant organizations are required to complete a series of registrations before they can    
  • submit a grant application. These include obtaining a DUNS number and registering at      
  • SAM, Grants.gov and eRA Commons.  In addition, foreign organizations are required to obtain an NCAGE number.
  • Application packages can be found and downloaded from Grants.gov.
  • Some universities and commercial providers have developed systems that send data directly to Grants.gov and dispense with the need for downloading forms.
  • Once submitted to Grants.gov and retrieved by NIH into eRA Commons, principal investigators and signing officials from the applicant organization can track the application(s) in the eRA Commons.
  • Agency business rules are applied once the application is processed by eRA. The eRA validations may result in errors or warnings, which are made available to principal investigators and institutional administrators in the eRA Commons.
  • Errors in the grant applications (critical problems with the application such as inaccuracies, inconsistencies or omissions) stop the application from processing and must be corrected by the submission deadline for the application to move forward in the submission process.
  • Warnings in the grant applications can be corrected at the discretion of the applicant. The application will move forward even if the warning is not corrected.
  • Errors must be corrected and an error-free application submitted to Grants.gov on or before the submission deadline to complete the process.
  • Applicants have two full business days after submitting an error-free application package to view the application, after which the submission process is complete and the application moves forward to the Receipt and Referral module.

Electronic Submission of Multi-Project Applications

NIH has built a system called ASSIST for on-line development and submission of multi-project applications.  See the ASSIST flyer for more information.

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