NIH announced Thursday, April 9, 2015 that a software upgrade will likely result in no awards issuing for a period starting May 19 and possibly extending as far out as June 3.
For more details about this news from NIH, visit their website.
Specifically, during the outage:
- No new or revised Notices of Award will be issued, regardless of grant type
- No processing of No-Cost Extensions of the final budget period but eRA Commons will remain available for submission of these requests (except on May 23, see below), and the Payment Management System will remain available for drawing down funds. However, NIH records will not be updated during the downtime.
- No processing of Fellowship Activations. Although xTrain will remain available for institutions submitting activation forms, NIH records will not be updated during the downtime.
Grantees will retain the ability to incur pre-award obligations and expenditures up to 90 days before the budget period start date at their own risk throughout this period. Draw-downs can still occur during the outage period and new applications can still be submitted through Grants.gov.
Also, on May 23 another system upgrade at NIH will cause an access outage to eRA Commons and Assist. NIH anticipates access will be unavailable for 12 hours on May 23rd. During that time:
- No submissions can be made to eRA Commons (e.g., Submission of Research Performance Progress Reports, Federal Financial Reports, Just-in-Time documents, institutional registrations, and other items submitted through eRA Commons)
- No submission of new applications through ASSIST