Continuing Resolutions all the way to the next round.

December is one thing. It has to be expected value at this point that we in the NIH funded extramural research community are going to have to weather some weirdness for the December 1 funding date. To recap, grant applications submitted for the Feb-March receipt deadlines are reviewed in Jun-July, move on to Advisory Council (for a given IC) review in Aug-Sep and are generally proposed for Dec 1 for the first *possible* funding date. Whenever there is a failure of Congress to pass a budget authorizing the NIH to spend money for the new Fiscal Year, things get funky.

Typically, however, a budget has been passed with the NIH appropriation by the next “first possible funding date”, i.e., for grant applications submitted Jun-Jul, reviewed Oct-Nov for possible award as early as April 1.

You will have noted, Dear Reader, that we are past this date.

So I cruised over to RePORTER and found some 283 new R01s funded since 4/1/2011. This is in contrast with the 66 I found a few days into December 2010.

ICs seem to have resigned themselves to operating under this new reality. Either that or Newt Gingrich’s support has stiffened their spines.

The one thing we can’t tell from RePORTER is when these proposals were submitted. Could b leftovers from the prior round or could be from the new round. I’m betting they are mostly from the new round and the limbo-zone holdovers from December are still waiting. I’m sure the comments over at writedit’s place will clue us in on that.

Now, while I was a-RePORTERing, I happened to notice the pile of new grants funded by one of my ICs of greatest interest. One-third funded as A0, two-thirds as A1. Hmm. So I check another IC of interest – 50% on A1; another- 60%; another- only 7.5% on A1 (wowza)…and then just roughly looking at a bunch of other ones, I’d say the trend continues to improve for those grants funded on the first submission. We’ll want to keep our eyes on ones that continue to stink fund a lot of A1 proposals, of course. I think I may have mentioned before that I think two-thirds funded on the first submission and one-third on the A1 would be my initial target. If an IC wants to be serious about revision churning, that is.