Indeed, Grants.gov allows as many "AOR"'s as submitters as the local
authorities want.  You can even delegate it to faculty and unit staff
if you consider Grants.gov just an electronic delivery system.

One problem arises in that only the person who submitted an
application gets the email verification and is the only person who
can check the status of the submission in Grants.gov.  It is, of
course, possible for people in an office to share passwords so
various people can then sign in and check on each others'
submissions.  Not the best SOP for a secure system.  It is also
possible to have a "generic AOR" whose identity is assumed by all
submitters.  All belong to the group email to which verifications are
sent and all can use that collective signon and pass word to check
the files.

Moreover, it is not clear whom the NIH eRA Commons will consider the
appropriate "SO" to do the second approval.  I suspect that the
system will use the person who is listed at as the official contact
person, in Section 19 of the SF 424(R&R).  This may or may not be the
person who did the actual Grants.gov submission.  Thus there needs to
be a way for Grants Offices to cross reference the Grants.gov
submission with the NIH Commmons verification.  While not really a
problem for institutions that have only a hand full of applications
per deadline, it will be a big problem for those of us with 100's of
submissions.  Made more so because of the lack of very useful
identification information that comes from Grants.gov in the
verification email and is then stored in the system.  I hope the NIH
email will be much more useful with identification of the
application, with an URL link to the actual proposal in the Commons
(as has been done with the previous NIH eCGAP system).

I wish there might have been some user testing of these systems to
find problems and solutions before we set our faculty to the
estimated 40 hours needed to prepare an application. (page 1-7,
Grants.gov Application Guide SF424 (R&R)) plus who knows how much
Grants Office time to review, submit, keep track of, and approve.

Bob
__________________________________
Robert Beattie
Managing  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

On Oct 21, 2005, at 8:16 AM, Smiley, Rick wrote:

What is meant by the “single submitter” remarks below? At Grants.gov,
any number of people at your institution can have submit authority –
each with their own userid and password.

East Carolina University

Tomorrow Starts Here

Rick Smiley
Grant & Contract Officer

Office of Sponsored Programs
2200 Charles Boulevard, Rm 2906
Greenville, NC 27858-4363

xxxxxx@ECU.EDU
http://www.research2.ecu.edu/osp

tel:
fax:

252.328.9539
252.328.4363

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From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@HRINET.ORG] On
Behalf Of Steven Etheredge
Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 5:50 PM
To: xxxxxx@HRINET.ORG
Subject: Re: [RESADM-L] Double approvals for submission of an NIH
grant via Grants.gov

Bob,

This really concerns us also, and I hope we can get this concern
across to NIH.  It is difficult enough to get the proposal submitted
one time electronically through Grants.gov, much less having to do a
second validation and approval by PI and SO through the Commons.

Undoubtedly, NIH does not fully trust that the Grants.gov system will
deliver a valid proposal to them.

As a large institution with delegation of submittal authority within
my office, I anticipate that the single submitter concept is going to
be unacceptable when all of the fed agencies start using Grants.gov
for submissions.  It is not just the sharing of the username/password
but the lack of concurrent logins.  Use has been not been as
widespread by our largest sponsors yet, but with NIH and NSF coming
online, I see real problems on the horizon.  I am not sure how we
will handle the daily volume with one login on major deadline days.

Steve Etheredge

R. Steven Etheredge, CRA
Director, Pre-Award Services
Sponsored Awards Management
University of South Carolina
(803) 777-4457
(803) 777-4136 fax
xxxxxx@gwm.sc.edu

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 via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
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