Reminder NIH Deadlines and Proposal Submission Policy

The NIH summer deadlines (June 5, June 12, June 16,  July 5, July 12, July 16, August 8, etc) are upon us and these are always a high volume proposal time for Sponsored Programs (see the complete list of deadlines). In addition to the normal high proposal volumes, the majority of these deadlines fall on a weekend, Monday, or after a holiday which historically results in many more proposals being finalized on deadline day.

Your assistance in notifying us of your intention to submit a proposal for the upcoming deadlines and submitting the final proposal according to Boston University’s Proposal Submission Policy will help ensure a smooth and successful submission.

As a reminder, according to the submission policy we request all administrative components be finalized 5 business days before the deadline and the final and complete proposal be submitted to Sponsored Programs 3 business days before the deadline.  Proposals that become complete on the day of the deadline are at risk of not being successfully submitted given high volumes and system pressures.

Example

To meet the June 16 deadline, SP should receive:

  1. All administrative components complete and final by Thursday, June 9;
  2. Final and complete proposal, including all final technical components, by Monday, June 13

Adherence to this timeframe will allow Sponsored Programs to conduct a thorough review of your proposal and submit it with enough time to address any unexpected system issues in advance of the deadline. In the last two weeks, we have had two proposals that unfortunately were not submitted to the sponsor on time due to unexpected system issues on the day of the deadline. As we get closer to the deadlines, we have experienced significant delays in receiving submission confirmations and system-wide crashes due to the sheer volume of proposals processed nationwide by grants.gov. Thorough review of proposals and submitting well in advance of the deadline will help mitigate these unexpected issues.

For all NIH proposals, please use ASSIST to develop your application.

We will review proposals as we receive them and will make every effort to submit each proposal, but we cannot guarantee a successful “on time” submission for proposals that do not adhere to the proposal submission policy. We will complete review and submission of proposals submitted on time before turning to proposals received after the submission policy guideline deadlines.

Thank you for your assistance and please feel free to reach out to your Sponsored Programs RA to notify them of any planned submissions and or if you have any questions.

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