I love your comment that "I'm afraid some faculty will get burned before they change their personal practices."

Even at a very small nonprofit where I do all of the proposal submissions myself, know what propoals are coming up quite accurately, and can generally track each PI down in person in less than 5 minutes if they are in town, it is incredibly hard to enforce deadlines of any type.  I had one PI watch as I pressed the submit button on an NSF FastLane submission less than 10 seconds before the deadline.  We were working non-stop for the previous hour getting content loaded and revised.  I don't think she will ever be that late again.

We have a large number of NOAA grants, and NOAA was an early-adopter of Grants.gov, so we've been doing G.g submissions for a year now.  There was one small competition where a technical problem in one of the forms kept us from submitting two proposals on time because the legal name of our organization had too many characters.  True to form, the G.g error message we received did not actually tell us what the problem was, but instead told us nothing was entered in the field.  We were denied the opportunity to enter the competition even though I actually emailed both complete proposals to the program office by the deadline so that they knew we had it done by the deadline, and I had contacted G.g telephone support before the deadline.  The problem is that the G.g help desk closed for the night one hour before the deadline.  And as you all know now, until you actually try to submit, you don't know what you errors will be.  Again, these two PIs will never again expect to get me content 2 hours before the deadline and have everything go smoothly.

(Just a note that one of the reasons they didn't accept the proposals was that G.g was not required for this competition -- we just thought it would be easier since we had not had problems with it before -- and they claimed we could still have mailed the proposal to meet the deadline.  In rural Seward, Alaska, the nearest post office open past 4:30pm is a 2 hour drive away, and I was not about to make a 4 hour roundtrip to Anchorage because of a G.g technical problem.  I made the mistaken assumption that if it was a technical problem on their end, we wouldn't be held responsible.  Live and learn...)

My response was to set stricter deadlines (basically that all proposals have to be submitted one day before the deadline) -- not because I think people will abide by them -- but rather to protect myself such that if I receive late content I don't feel responsible.

Tara Jones

************************
Tara Riemer Jones, Ph.D.
Grants and Contracts Manager
Alaska SeaLife Center
(800) 224-2525 ext. 6343
(907) 224-6343 direct
(907) 224-6320 fax
xxxxxx@alaskasealife.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Research Administration List on behalf of Maryellen O'Brien
Sent: Fri 3/3/2006 8:16 AM
To: xxxxxx@HRINET.ORG
Subject: Re: [RESADM-L] Change in business practices to accommodate Grants.gov

We've requested a lead time of 5 business days on applications for the
past two years in anticipation of electronic submissions, but we get
little to no compliance.  We also don't have any leverage with faculty,
because we must submit even at the last minute, which is most of the
time.  We have a small staff, so we depend on the departmental staff and
faculty to put the proposal together.  We review the budget and admin
pages and do the final submission.  That still takes considerable time
if you have multiple proposals or deadlines.  I'm afraid some faculty
will get burned before they change their personal practices.

As for collaborative arrangements, I think we're still going to ask for
hard copies of approved budgets, cover pages or letters from the
subgrantee.  It's our reassurance that the other grants office is in the
loop and makes it easier to issue the sub should the grant get funded.

We are also preparing more training and beefing up the resources on our
web site.  If any of you have good training materials or web material
that you're willing to share with us and let us use or edit, I think
we'd all be appreciative.  I've been perusing other univ. web sites and
I've seen some great resources out there.  It takes a lot of time to
create these documents and I'd rather not reinvent the wheel if it's
been done elsewhere.  I'm happy to give credit on our website or in our
sessions.

Maryellen O'Brien
Assistant Director
Grant and Contract Administration
Office of Research and Sponsored Programs
Rutgers University
ASBIII, 3 Rutgers Plaza

New Brunswick, NJ  08901

Ph:   732-932-0150, Ext. 2111
Fax:  732-932-0162
Email:  xxxxxx@orsp.rutgers.edu
<blocked::mailto:xxxxxx@orsp.rutgers.edu>
Web:    http://orsp.rutgers.edu <blocked::http://orsp.rutgers.edu>

________________________________

From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@HRINET.ORG] On
Behalf Of Valk, Jean
Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 11:25 AM
To: xxxxxx@HRINET.ORG
Subject: Re: [RESADM-L] Change in business practices to accommodate
Grants.gov

Steve,

Although we have not yet submitted our first electronic NIH submission
(we will do so for the Shared Instrumentation Grant program), our
central Research Management office is already being very aggressive in
planning changes to the internal deadline for submission. We're planning
on the full budgetary and administrative section (plus a draft of the
research plan) due 15 business days before the NIH deadline, and then
the final grant (including final research plan) due 5 full business days
before the deadline. This will give central admin 5 days submit the
grants and respond to any errors (and we hope that will be enough!).

Jean

Jean Valk
Director, Research Programs
Radiology Research Administration
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Tel: 617-954-9563
Fax: 617-954-9566
Email: xxxxxx@partners.org

The information transmitted in this email is intended only for the
person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential
and/or privileged material.  Any review, retransmission, dissemination
or any other use of or taking of any action in reliance upon this
information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is
prohibited. If you received this email in error, please contact the
sender and delete the material from any computer.

 -----Original Message-----
 From: Research Administration List
[mailto:xxxxxx@HRINET.ORG]On Behalf Of Steven Etheredge
 Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 10:44 AM
 To: xxxxxx@HRINET.ORG
 Subject: [RESADM-L] Change in business practices to accommodate
Grants.gov

 Dear Colleagues:

 Like most of you probably are doing, I am taking a short
breather after our first NIH-Grants.gov submission cycle (along with all
the other 3/1 deadlines) and gathering my thoughts about how to do
better next cycle.  While some of the issues are in the hands of NIH and
G.g, we have our own internal business practices to examine to see if we
need changes in light of this implementation.  Knowing that NIH was
granting some forbearance in these early cycles and that our number of
AREA submissions would be small, we have not changed our standard
practice of asking for the proposals 3 days ahead of time.  Our course,
like most, our faculty did not get the final proposals to our office
until Monday afternoon.  Like most we had to submit a couple of times to
clear the validation errors which led to a late evening for some of our
staff.

 That said, I am asking if your institution has changed its
business practices to now require all/some proposals to arrive earlier
at your office to deal with the transition to G.g, especially in light
of the NIH/G.g dual validation processes.  If you have made such a
change, would you share that info with the list.  While we never want to
establish an absolute rule regarding proposal deadlines, we need to
provide guidance to our proposers to manage our workload while being
able to successfully submit their proposals.

 The G.g transition over the next 12-18 months is challenging
some of the ways we have traditionally done business and we are trying
to adopt best practices to successfully implement this transition.

 Thanks for your input.

 Steve

 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

======================================================================
Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available via
our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================

======================================================================
Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available via
our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================

======================================================================
 Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
 subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available
 via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================

======================================================================
 Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
 subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available
 via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================