NIH Enhances Process of Notice of Award (NoA) Email Notifications
(NOT-OD-09-127)
National Institutes of Health
When NIH issues a Notice of Award (NoA), the official document is made
available to grantee officials and corresponding Program Directors/Principal
Investigators through the eRA Commons.
The eRA Commons is the official repository for this document. As part of the NoA process, NIH has continued
the practice of notifying the grantee via e-mail address when an award has been
issued.
The purpose of this Guide Notice is to notify the grantee community that in
recent months NIH has determined that the email notification system can be
improved to ensure that email notifications are consistently and correctly
sent.
While implementing this improvement, NIH determined that certain NoA
notifications were not initially sent to the grantee. For those in this category since July 1,
2009, NIH has regenerated these notifications and sent them to the
grantee. Please note that the delayed
sending of NoA email notification does not affect the original content (e.g.,
award date, dollars awarded, etc) or their posting in the eRA Commons.
System improvements will be implemented over the course of the next few months
by the eRA Team. A partial system
improvement will be released on July 24, 2009 and the final improvement will be
made in October 2009. An automated
notification monitoring system will also be put in place in October to ensure
that any NoA notification errors are addressed in a timely manner. In the meantime, eRA staff will perform
daily, manual checks to identify any notification anomalies and regenerate NoA
notifications as needed.
Signing Officials (SOs) can also assist in this improvement effort by ensuring
that the NoA email address recorded in the Institutional Profile for your
institution is kept current. SOs can
edit the award email field by following the instructions provided in the
Editing Institutional Profile Information link in the eRA Commons. Grantee institutions are strongly encouraged
to use a unique email address that is not specific to an individual to avoid
notification problems when personnel change.
The organization is responsible for maintaining an accurate NoA email
address. In addition to the email
notifications, grantees are reminded that there are other ways to check for
recently issues awards within the eRA System:
*Use the public Issued Notice of (Grant) Award (http://era.nih.gov/commons/quick_queries/NIH_issued-NGAs.cfm) query on the eRA Web site to general a list of awards issued to your organization over a selected period. You will need to know your organization’s Institution Profile File (IPF) Number in order to use this query. Your IPF number can be found by logging into Commons and accessing the Basic information section of your organization’s Institution Profile or you can use the public IPF Number Search query to obtain the number.
*Use the Recently Awarded search option in eRA Commons status to identify the list of awards matching your search criteria. You must have an eRA Commons account with a Signing Official (SO) or Administrative Official (AO) role to use this feature.Inquiries concerning this Notice may be directed to:
eRA Commons Help Desk
Web: http://ithelpdesk.nih.gov/eRA/
Toll-free: 1-866-504-9552
Phone: 301-402-7469
TTY: 301-451-5939
Hours: Mon-Fri, 7a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Time
