Welcome to the new Feedback Loop site, the place to get NIGMS news as it happens.
For this first post, I want to update you on NIH and NIGMS Recovery Act funding plans and opportunities. If you have questions about administrative supplements, revisions or two-year R01s, you should read the FAQs we just posted on the NIGMS Recovery Act Web site.
We want this resource to be as useful as possible, so I encourage you to let us know if you have questions that aren’t answered in our FAQs or in the NIH FAQs we link to. One way to do this is by submitting a comment to this post.
Also be sure to visit our updated NIGMS Recovery Act guidance document. It includes information on three recent NIH notices:
- Funding considerations for applications with meritorious scores that fall beyond the payline
- Programmatic limitations and use of modular budgets in relation to supplement and revision requests
- Specific business processes for Recovery Act funding
We plan to make new Feedback Loop posts about once a week and focus on one or a few topics each time, so you can quickly get the information you need. We’ll also organize previous posts by topic so you can easily find them.
If you would like to get new content automatically, you can sign up to receive it by e-mail or RSS feed. Of course, you can change your subscription options at any time.
Please tell your colleagues about the site and encourage them to subscribe, as well.
Can NIGMS comment on the requirement that the maximum possible length of the supplement award will depend on the time remaining on the parent project, including the anticipated extension period vs information in NOT-OD-09-080 that indicates ARRA T-3 budgets and project period will reflect only the ARRA portion and need not be in sync with the parent grant and No-cost Extensions for ARRA T-3 is allowable (up to 12 months) regardless of status of parent grant. Does this mean the parent grant could possibly have ened say 1/31/10 but the ARRA T-3 could end 1/31/11? Thank you.
The NIH administrative supplement notice includes some flexibility for this very situation. It states, “Note that while NIH recommends that a no-cost extension already be in place before an administrative supplement request is submitted, this is not a requirement for all administrative supplement requests.”
In this situation, you should prepare the administrative supplement request with the expected extension in mind and include those intentions in the application, including your institution’s plans to execute the notification through the eRA Commons extension feature when appropriate.
Keep in mind that the maximum possible length of the supplement award will depend on the time remaining on the parent project, including the anticipated extension period.
Thank you for your question. We realize how confusing these issues can be with the wide range of possible scenarios.
Consider the following situation:
A grantee has an award that expires on August 31, 2009 and is not already in extension. Within 90 days of this expiration date, the grantee may exercise the authority to invoke a one-time, no-cost extension to August 31, 2010 using the eRA Commons.
In the meantime, the grantee could submit an ARRA administrative supplement request that would include support through the period of the anticipated no-cost extension (August 31, 2010). (The request must include a statement describing the grantee’s intent to execute the no-cost extension when appropriate.) If NIGMS funds this ARRA administrative supplement, the supplement award will reflect an end date of August 31, 2010. So for a short period of time, the parent grant (ending on August 31, 2009) and the supplement (ending on August 31, 2010) will not be in synch.
Once the grantee exercises the no-cost extension option, the parent grant will be extended to August 31, 2010, and the parent and supplement will be in synch.
Within 90 days of the expiration of the ARRA supplement on August 31, 2010, the grantee may exercise the authority to invoke a one-time, no-cost extension of the supplement, moving its end date to August 31, 2011 using the eRA Commons.
However, keep in mind that the intent of the ARRA funds is to provide a short-term economic stimulus, so applicants should plan to spend the ARRA funds by the end of the initial award period.