2016 NSF Grant Proposal Guide Summary of Changes

The National Science Foundation released its 2016 Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) and Award and Administration Guide (AAG), collectively referred to as the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG) on Monday, December 7, 2015.

Effective Date: Proposals due or submitted on or after January 25, 2016

Significant changes in the new guidelines include the following:

  1. Proposals must be submitted by 5 p.m. submitter’s local time on the deadline date, or they will no longer be accepted. “Submitter’s local time” is determined by the ZIP Code of the submitting institution (so Mountain Time for CU Boulder), regardless of where the individual submitting the proposal is located. 

    However, the deadline for the Graduate Research Fellowship Program will remain 8 p.m. (also submitter’s local time). Exceptions may be granted on a case-by-case basis for late submissions relating to natural or anthropogenic events (disasters, weather closures, etc.), but these must be given in writing by a cognizant program officer.
  2. Collaborators and Other Affiliations information will no longer be included in the biographical sketch. Instead, each senior project person must submit a single-copy document listing their collaborators and other affiliations (the same criteria about whom to list apply). Totals for each category are no longer required.
  3. Biographical sketches may no longer be grouped together in a single PDF file. Each individual designated as senior project personnel must submit a separate biographical sketch. For individuals designated as other personnel (e.g., consultants, postdocs, evaluators, technical experts), biographical sketches must be labeled “Other Personnel” and uploaded as supplementary documents (where allowed). They may no longer be combined with the PI’s biographical sketch.
  4. Current and pending support must now include all sources of current project support, including internal funds allocated toward specific projects (i.e., internally funded projects which require commitment of an investigator’s time). Note that this does not apply to start-up funds or other internal funding that is given as a lump sum and which does not require a specific commitment of the investigator’s time.

    As with biographical sketches, current and pending support information may no longer be combined into a single PDF file. Each senior person must provide his/her own information.
  5. When suggesting reviewers to NSF, investigators should include the email address and institutional affiliation of the suggested reviewers.
  6. Guidance has been updated regarding Results from Prior NSF Support, to reflect that information must be provided for any PI or co-PI that has received NSF funding with a start date in the past five years (including any current funding and no-cost extensions), regardless of the type of award.
  7. The Project Description may not include any URLs, and must include a separate section titled “Broader Impacts.” (In previous years, the title required for this section was “Broader Impacts of the Proposed Work.”)
  8. Letters of collaboration must now follow a format specified in the GPG. Any deviation from that format will not be allowed and the proposal may be returned without review.

NSF Public Access Policy

The biggest change in the 2016 PAPPG is the implementation of NSF’s policy for providing public access to scientific publications and digital scientific data resulting from work funded wholly or in part by the Foundation on or after January 25, 2016.

The following documents are available to view:

Policy

Plan

FAQ

Applicability

Papers published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals or appearing in juried conference proceedings or transactions that resulted, wholly or in part, from work funded by the National Science Foundation under an award made on or after January 25, 2016. While NSF does not anticipate any mandatory depositions until fall 2016, once the repository is open (anticipated December 2015 or January 2016), investigators may voluntarily deposit such works, and may be invited to do so by program officers as part of a beta testing phase. (The scope of works required to be deposited may expand in future.)

Requirements

Papers subject to the policy must:

  • Be deposited in a public-access compliant repository, NSF-PAR (Public Access Repository), developed by the Department of Energy and designated by NSF as its repository;
  • Be available for download, reading, and analysis free of charge, no later than 12 months after initial publication (investigators may petition NSF to change the embargo period, page 19 of the Plan);
  • Possess a minimum set of machine-readable metadata elements in a metadata record to be made available free of charge upon initial publication (page 14 of the Plan);
  • Be managed to ensure long-term preservation; and
  • Be reported in annual and final reports during the award period with a persistent identifier, either the DOI (digital object identifier) or another unique identifier created by the NSF-PAR, which provides links to the full text of the publication as well as other metadata elements. For works subject to the policy, deposition in the repository is a requirement in order to report the publication in any annual or final report.

Either the final accepted manuscript or the version of record (i.e., the published paper as it appears in the journal or the conference proceedings) must be deposited, similar to the NIH public access policy implemented in 2008. Deposition in NSF-PAR is mandatory; deposition in an institutional repository, or one maintained by a particular discipline (SSRN, arXiv, etc.) is not sufficient, although works can be deposited in such repositories in addition to NSF-PAR.

Data

For the moment, NSF has not implemented the data-sharing requirements of the February 22, 2013 memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, although a working group has begun to develop policies and procedures to do so. Until those policies and procedures are in place, existing NSF policies with regard to data, including the preparation of data management plans at proposal stage, will be continued.

Procedure

Although the full procedure for deposition has not yet been announced, pending availability of the repository at the end of the year, we know that:

  • Deposition will be managed through a dashboard in Research.gov
  • Once data are entered for NSF-PAR in Research.gov, the information will auto-populate in NSF annual or final report templates, so there will not be any duplicate entry required
  • If the work being deposited has a DOI, it can be entered on the Research.gov dashboard, and the publication information will auto-populate into the repository, again reducing the burden on investigators to do data entry.
  • Publication data can be entered manually for works without a DOI.