January 20, 2014: NIH Closed for Federal Holiday

December 31, 2013

NIH (including help desks) will be closed Monday, January 20, 2014 (Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday). If a postmark/submission date falls on this federal holiday, the application deadline is automatically extended to the next business day.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

December 31, 2013

This certainly has been a tough year for the research community supported by NIH. We started off the year on a continuing resolution with the threat of sequester looming. In March sequestration began, and we had to update our fiscal plan to accommodate reduced spending by making fewer competing awards, and in most instances issuing non-competing awards at levels below the expected FY2013 commitments. The impact of the sequester is not just limited to this fiscal year, ….

New Funding Opportunities with a Focus on Workforce Diversity

December 30, 2013

The biomedical research enterprise relies on engaging talented researchers from all groups, including individuals from diverse backgrounds underrepresented in biomedical research. As I described earlier here on the blog, NIH has planned the launch of several programs to increase workforce diversity. I’m excited to let you know that on December 19 we issued the funding announcements for the three core initiatives that make up the Common Fund “Enhancing the Diversity of the NIH-Funded Workforce” program. ….

Awardee Institutions Reminded to Submit Annual Reports Due to the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare

December 27, 2013

Awardee institutions with Animal Welfare Assurances must submit annual reports to the NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) as a requirement of the Public Health Service (PHS) Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Reports for the 2013 calendar year are due to OLAW by January 31, 2014. For details on what to include and how to submit annual reports ….

New Tools for Searching NIH-funded Projects

December 27, 2013

The RePORTER on the Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT) website has been updated to enhance your search of NIH-funded projects. One such update, Matchmaker, is a new query interface where users can submit abstracts or other scientific text to find similar projects. ….

PubMed Gets Interactive

December 19, 2013

Today NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM) is bringing a new way of sharing and exchanging research information, fully integrated with the PubMed website, to a wider audience. For the last few months, NLM has been running a pilot of a commenting system for PubMed’s massive database of biomedical literature. The system, PubMed Commons, allows authors to discuss and share information through comments on article citations. Hundreds of authors have signed up as beta testers and commenters since the pilot began. ….

Application Success Rates Decline in 2013

December 18, 2013

As we go into the last few weeks of the year, my office is busy working up the final numbers on application data for this year. Although the complete set of application data, tables, and graphs will not be available until later in January, I thought I would provide an early snapshot on success rates for 2013 competing research project grant (RPG) applications and awards. …..