I received this message from Bob Killoren at Penn State, who is not
currently subscribed to the resadm-l LISTSERV.

Mike Luczak
Grants Administrator
Saint Louis University Health Sciences Center
xxxxxx@wpogate.slu.edu
Phone:  314-577-8108
Fax:  314-268-5551

___________________________________

Mike:

Please share this with your listserve colleagues.

Someone on campus brought your recent email on the cancellation of
NIH's  participation in the Faculty Opportunity Alert system to my
attention.

We have worked very hard here at Penn State to enroll our faculty on
Opportunity Alert.  We must have close to 1,000 researchers enrolled in
the  system.  It is one of the primary mechanisms we have for getting
new  opportunities in the hands of faculty.

Like many institutions, we use multiple means of disseminating
information,  including subscription services like SPIN and Community of
Science.  For  the NIH Guide specifically, each week we distribute the
table of contents  to the NIH Guide to our campus research
administrators, who in turn pass it  on to their faculty or set up links to
new items in college web sites.  Yet  with all this we know we do not
catch everybody.  This is where the  Opportunity Alert comes in, it is just
one other valuable tool in our  toolbox -- but one that the faculty control
themselves!

Beyond the loss of a tool, I am very dissappointed to see NIH take this
step without openly getting input from the community.  ( I say "openly"
because it was never specifically mentioned that changing the way the
NIH  Guide was to be made available was going to mean cancelling NIH's
overall  participation in Opportunity Alert.)  We are having enough trouble
getting  faculty to buy into ERA as a new way of doing business without
getting them  all excited about a new service and then having NIH pull
out.  What am I  going to tell all the faculty who have come to rely on
Opportunity Alert  for their NIH information? Well, sorry you took all that
time and energy to  sign-up... but you won't be getting anymore NIH
information out of it!

What NIH puts into this system in terms of financial support can't be much
 more than the equivalent of one R01 per year.  This modest investment
makes  NIH information available to tens of thousands of faculty in an
easy  user-friendly way.

Sometimes mistakes are made (even by NIH!) -- I believe that if the
community makes its feelings known about this to the NIH they might
reconsider.  If your faculty are happy users of Opportunity Alert... let
NIH know at:  xxxxxx@nih.gov

Bob Killoren
Penn State

cc: xxxxxx@nih.gov