2017 NSF Grant Proposal Guide Summary of Changes

The National Science Foundation released its 2017 Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG) on Tuesday, October 25, 2016. One change in this release is that the old distinction between the Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) and the Award and Administrative Guide (AAG) has been eliminated. The PAPPG is now a single document, and all references have been updated to reflect this (which also means that some of the section numbering has changed).

Effective Date: Proposals due or submitted on or after January 30, 2017

Significant changes in the new guidelines include the following:

  1. The procedures for submitting proposals under exceptions to NSF deadlines (including cases of natural or anthropogenic disasters) have been revised. Proposers should still request permission from the cognizant program officer (preferably in advance of the deadline, if possible), but must now check a box on the proposal cover page indicating that the proposal is being submitted under an exception to the deadline rule. An explanation of the disaster or other event that prevented timely submission, and a copy of the communication from the program officer granting permission for the exception, must be uploaded as single copy documents.
  2. Collaborators and Other Affiliations information no longer needs to include postdocs sponsored by the investigator in question, but all graduate students for whom the investigator has served as a Ph.D. advisor must be listed. (Note: the five-year window no longer applies: all Ph.D. students an investigator has advised must now be listed.) The names in each section must be listed in alphabetical order.
  3. Biographical sketches may no longer be entered as text on FastLane. These must be uploaded as PDFs, one per senior personnel.
  4. Results from prior NSF support. The requirements about proposals to be included in this section have been updated:
    1. A project with a start date within the last five years (including any current funding and no-cost extensions) may be included.
    2. All NSF funding (Graduate Research Fellowships, Major Research Instrumentation, conference, equipment, travel, and center awards, not just individual or collaborative research awards) is subject to this requirement.
    3. If the project has just begun and does not yet have results to report, describe the major goals and broader impacts of the project as delineated in the original proposal.
  5. Use of an indirect cost rate lower than the institution’s federally negotiated rate will be considered a violation of NSF’s policy against voluntary committed cost sharing.

Revised FAQs

NSF has issued a revised version of its FAQ to accompany the new PAPPG. It can be found on the NSF website here.

NSF Public Access Policy

A reminder to PIs and others that 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 is now in effect.

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.