2 Comments
No. If you are submitting an application as a new (A0) application, you may not include anything in the application that refers to an earlier application, including the score, reviewers’ comments, changes you have made since your last submission, etc. A new section has been added to the resubmission FAQs that provides reviewers guidance on how to handle resubmission applications. Applicants may be interested in this guidance as well.
For more information on NIH application submission policies, visit the Submission Policies webpage on grants.nih.gov.
This policy does not make sense and is an over stepping of what CSR should dictate to applicants. If the applicant thinks the previous reviews are helpful to their application (lets call it an A0*), why prevent them from presenting this as background within the new application? What rationale can there be to limit any information that the applicant thinks will help their application? Study section members usually appreciate knowing the history of a grant even though they don’t always, and aren’t supposed to, use this a criteria for their scoring. This policy appears to have been set by people who are not directly involved in the process (i.e., CSR bureaucrats) who decided what is best for the people who are involved (i.e., applicants and reviewers). Why should this particular subject be banned from the A0* application over other pertinent information? This policy makes me wonder whether the reluctance of CSR to change the no resubmission policy of A1s after several years of community pressure has led to a punitive stance when defining the status of the information contained in the A0*. Please reconsider putting limits (beside page, font, line spacing etc) on the content of grant applications.
I entirely agree with Hank. If you look at the NSF process, for example, each application is effectively a new application, not a formal resubmission. There is no prohibition against referencing the history of your application and the ideas within the NSF system; this counts against your page limit, but sometimes the history of the ideas is just as important as the content itself.