NSF FastLane: New Automated Proposal Submission Compliance Checks

The National Science Foundation has issued a notice that effective July 25, 2016, all proposals will be subject to a new series of automated compliance validation checks to ensure proposals comply with requirements outlined in Chapter II.C.2. of the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG).

The new set of automated compliance checks will trigger warning or error messages depending on the funding opportunity type for each of the following rules:

• Biographical Sketch(es) and Current and Pending Support files are required for each Senior Personnel associated with a proposal.
• Biographical Sketch(es) can only be uploaded as a file, must not exceed two pages and can no longer be entered as text.

Proposers should be aware that if a proposal was previously submitted successfully with only one Biographical Sketch and/or Current & Pending Support file (rather than individual files for each senior personnel), a Proposal File Update performed on such proposals will be prevented from submission if it does not comply with the new compliance checks.

Proposers submitting through Grants.gov should be aware that Grants.gov will allow a proposal to be submitted, even if it does not comply with these proposal preparation requirements. Should NSF receive a proposal from Grants.gov that is not compliant, it may be returned without review.

For additional information see:
FastLane Advisory: Attention Proposers: New Automated Proposal Submission Compliance Checks Coming to FastLane
Research.gov: Attention Proposers: New Automated Proposal Submission Compliance Checks Coming to FastLane

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July 26, 2016 update: NSF has notified the community that “this implementation was rescheduled due to a power outage which caused all servers to shut down. The new automated proposal submission compliance checks will be available on August 1.”