As a contributor to the project, I hope the positive actions taken by
NIH staff reflect in some part a response to the recently released
Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) Faculty Survey report, which
identifies faculty research burden across FDP member institutions.
Several federal agencies, including the NIH, have contributed to
discussions of the findings and continue to express interest in reducing
burden among academic researchers.

For anyone interested, the report is downloadable at:
http://www.thefdp.org/Faculty_Committee.html   To learn more about
the FDP, visit: http://www.thefdp.org/About_FDP.html

Best,
Leslie Wimsatt, Ph.D.
University of Michigan

At 10:31 AM 4/27/2007, you wrote:

Over the course of the last, year NIH staff have made many positive
responses to requests from the Grants Community to make Grants.gov
life easier for us.  The deadline time was changed to 5pm local, the
extra approvals were removed, the 2 day viewing window was allowed,
many errors were changed to warnings, space for extra Key Personnel
was added.  More things too.

One feature many people have requested is a way for PI's to delegate
to their staff the capability to look up errors from Grants.gov
submissions in the Commons.  Assistants could be delegated to work on
eSnaps and on Profiles.  Only the PI and the SO could check the
submission status of an application and see the errors,  however.
Many of us have told PI's to use a group email address so people  other
than the PI would get the message from the Commons that there  were
warnings or errors with a submission.  Only if the PI gave away  a
username and password, could an assistant then see the actual  Commons
listings.

That has now changed.  With the next up grade of the NIH System the
following goes into effect.

 Adding feature “Delegate Status” so a Principal Investigator (PI)
may delegate to anyone holding a current Commons account with the
Assistant (ASST) role the ability to view the status of an  application
as if they had the Signing Official (SO) role for that  PI’s
applications.

There are other useful reasons for this too, but I now relate it only
for Grants.gov implications.  It will take effect after the Commons  is
down from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. ET on Friday, April 27.

This is great news and will make life for PI's plus research unit and
grants office staff much easier.

Thanks NIH

Bob
------------------------------
Robert Beattie
UMich Grants.gov Liaison
Managing Project Representative for Electronic Research Administration
Division of Research Development and Administration
University of Michigan
xxxxxx@umich.edu   (734) 936-1283
Learn more about Grants.gov @ UMICH
http://www.research.umich.edu/era/grants_gov/

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