As a confirmation of what Bob Beattie, Univ of Mich, wrote on NIH, eRA, and
vendors, several institutions have successfully partnered with vendors or
used their own internal systems for pilot submissions to NIH.  (We partnered
with InfoEd for a successful transmission of a new competitive grant
submission this past June.)  There are differences among the various
vendors, so it is worthwhile to check out information contained in the NIH
eRA web pages:

Submitting Grants Electronically to the NIH (contains an NIH questionnaire
where vendors provide information on their services/product) --
http://era.nih.gov/Projectmgmt/SBIR/sbir_grants.htm

NIH eRA Partnership Information (general and technical info for service
providers, also contains links for what can be expected from the PI and SPO
during a pilot) -- http://era.nih.gov/Projectmgmt/SBIR/

NIH has also reported that the end-to-end processing for eCGAP soon will be
available at the Commons demo site. This will provide PIs and other staff
who submit applications to try out the new electronic system and to practice
using it before attempting to submit their application.

-- Ellen Beck

------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 19 Oct 2004 13:15:37 -0400
From:    Robert Beattie <xxxxxx@UMICH.EDU>
Subject: Re: eRA

A couple of years ago NIH put out an RFP for an SBIR to obtain vendors
to help with development of the NIH Commons.  There were a number of
tasks for the vendors, all of which were part of CGAP.  Now eCGAP --
electronic Competing Grant Application Project. THere were a 6 vendors
selected.   See here for more details
http://era.nih.gov/Projectmgmt/SBIR/sbir_grants.htm

Some are, and may be in the future, a service provider.  You send them
your grant and they submit it to NIH.  Others provide, or say they will
provide in the future, a program for you to use at your own institution
to create an electronic proposal that you can send to NIH.

At the University of Michigan we have been working with the Cayuse
company to use their GrantSlam program to prepare the proposals locally
and then send to NIH.  They reconfigured their long standing paper
application producing program to create a data stream for the
electronic submission.

The NIH plans to put the eCGAP into production in January 2005 for R01
R03 and R21 new and competing  modular applications.  If you want to
participate you will need to find a vendor to work with.

Don't panic, however, like the early days of FastLane, this is not
mandatory. Purely voluntary.

Moreover, there is always Grants.gov to use for electronic submission.
Put your NIH 398 data into the 424R&R format.

I think there will be NIH and G.g people the forthcoming SRA and NCURA
national meetings to explain what's going on.  Also vendors will be
there too, I think.  Is it true that SRA is more friendly to vendors
than is NCURA?  By the way, if you do not want to hook up with a
vendor, you can build your own links to the NIH Commons for the various
applications like you can do for the System to System version of
Grants.gov.

Bob
__________________________________
Robert Beattie
Managing Senior Project Representative
 for Electronic Research Administration
Division of Research Development and Administration
University of Michigan
3003 S. State Street   Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1274
office: 734 936-1283    mobile: 734 717-6281
xxxxxx@umich.edu

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