NIH Announces New Format and Electronic Award Notification

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced that, as a first step in the transition from paper to electronic exchange of information, it is reformatting the current Notice of Grant Award (NGA) form.

Effective October 1, all NIH grant, cooperative agreement, and fellowship awards will be issued in a letter format. The new letter-format NGA will no longer provide

a cumulative record of all transactions affecting the particular budget period. For example, a supplemental award will only reflect the amount of the supplemental action, not the cumulative support for that budget period.

NIH has begun pilot testing the electronic NGA with a small group of grantee institutions. These institutions have provided NIH with a generic E-mail address established for this purpose. NIH recommends that any grant recipients wishing to receive electronic NGAs establish a generic and stable E-mail address specifically for this purpose.

Similar to the current paper process, the NGA will be sent to the designated e-mail address. The grantee institution will be responsible for distributing the NGA, along with any special terms and conditions, to the principal investigator and other appropriate officials within the recipient organization.

NIH anticipates that electronic NGAs will be transmitted routinely to all grant recipients capable of receiving electronic notices by the end of calendar year 1998. Receiving NGAs electronically will be optional to meet the needs of grant recipients that do not have the capability to receive electronic information.