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Experiencing a system issue with ASSIST, Grants.gov, SAM, or eRA Commons that you believe threaten your ability to submit on time? Don’t panic. NIH will not penalize applicants who experience confirmed system issues that are beyond their control. However, it is imperative that you follow our Guidelines for Applicants Experiencing System Issues. This process includes contacting the eRA Commons Help Desk by the due date to report your issue and your good-faith effort to submit on time. Once it is confirmed that a system issue exists, the eRA help desk will work with you to determine the best path forward. In many cases, the eRA production support team can reprocess your application without any additional action on your end. In other cases, they will provide guidance on changes that must be made to the application in order to process it. Either way, the first step to resolution is contacting the eRA Commons Help Desk.
Applicants that fail to document their issues on or before the submission deadline or that do not have a confirmed system issue will be subject to the standard NIH Policy on Late Submission of Grant Applications.
As always, the eRA Commons Help Desk is available to clarify any of the above items.
Good advice for “sponsored programs” divisions at universities.
You might want to make sure the people actually rejecting the applications knows that this is the policy. The last application we submitted was delayed due to SAM systems problem and a bug in the Adobe application package that were reported. We followed the instructions of the service desk but the application was thrown in the trash without even being looked at anyway.