NIH announces 16% more proposals will be considered for funding!

Dudes! It’s good news.

LOL.

A recent NIH Notice (NOT-OD-26-012) includes the first formal announcement of an expanded triage rate that will be used for the next two rounds (at least) of study sections. This broke as a rumor on the socials, but now we have confirmation.

The percent of applications discussed in most meetings will be reduced to 30-35%, instead of the current ~50%.

Of course, this was met with dismay then and we are seeing some additional kvetching today. Obviously getting triaged in study section (aka “Not Discussed” or ND) is not good for your grant. I’m a bit fuzzy on this, but I have always assumed it takes some very heavy lifting to fund a ND grant and this may even be impossible in practice if not in law. A proposal that gets discussed and then gets a 50%ile-plus ranking is more likely (not likely, likely) to be funded than one with essentially identical criterion scores, preliminary overall impact scores and level of criticism/enthusiasm that happens to be ND.

After that we get into the nebulous value of being discussed / scored versus ND. One thought is that the resume of discussion is able to better guide the applicant towards an amended version (or A2asA0) that will be funded. Another is that the applicant isn’t as depressed. Another is that the score benchmarking that is not supposed to guide reviewers of follow-up proposals (amended or A2asA0) still works here and there so this must surely be an advantage. There is reference to internal University or Department policies where being discussed may extend bridge funding that is not accessed with a ND.

I dunno. As good old Report 302 reminds us, proposals that are in the 30th percentile and higher are not that likely to fund. Of the 16,357 R01eqv apps submitted for FY2024, 30.6% (5,001) were funded. Only 0.27% (44) were funded at ranks of 30%-ile or worse. This represents only 0.88% of the funded R01eqv getting to the promised land with a percentile rank within this new triage window. (Another 0.38% (63) of proposals were funded as R56 awards. )

That databook report also shows quite clearly that the rough overall payline was 10%ile. The 50/50 crossover point was around 14-15%ile. Some 4.1% of grants scored at 30%ile were funded but only 2.4% at a 31%ile…and it was all downward from there. We are pretty sure that the multi-year funding will push those numbers downward for FY2025 despite NIH spending out the same budget level. And we surely have to anticipate that FY2026 will be no better in overall budget, may see a reduction and will continue with the multi-year funding plan.

So even if we were facing a permanent change to the triage line, I’m not sure this has much functional impact on us as a whole. But the Notice makes it clear this is just to catchup for the fact that:

The shutdown required that NIH cancel over 370 peer review meetings, impacting the review of over 24,000 applications. The volume of missed meetings complicates NIH efforts to catch up.

My assumption is that this saves time by moving re-scheduled meetings to a single day, likely much easier to reschedule for an entire panel of busy scientists. It also cuts down on the number of resumes of discussion the SRO has to prepare as s/he is deep into the pipeline of preparing for the next round of meetings in Feb/Mar.

The notice even says this move is to help get the proposals into consideration at the scheduled January Advisory Councils.

This seems well worth the rather nebulous “costs” in my view.

Ok, so what about the title of this post, you are now asking yourself. Well, there is an interesting little bone thrown to us.

Applications voted by the committee to be in the middle third will be designated as “competitive but not discussed” and applications in the lowest third will be designated as “not competitive and not discussed”. Applications in the middle third will be considered for funding, along with the discussed applications.

This dovetails with another recently announced policy which is directed at diminishing the relative contribution of percentile rank to the selection for funding. I am just making up this 16% number, but basically this says that the proposals from 33%ile (based on preliminary score, presumably?) to 66%ile ( ok, ok, 66.7%ile) will be in the running for exception pay. Previously, only the 33%ile to 50%ile subset were discussed and in the running for a pickup. Now, those extra 16.7% from 51%ile to 66.7%ile will be similarly considered.

Isn’t this great, guys? Should not we be celebrating, oh ye who were going ballistics about the new triage line?

NIH extends the Oct-Nov deadlines to Dec 8, 2025

The NIH has issued a Notice (NOT-OD-26-012) which expands upon the prior warning (NOT-OD-26-005) about extending the current submission deadlines. It seems to be quite comprehensive.

All grant applications submitted late for due dates between October 1, 2025, and December 5, 2025, will be accepted through 5:00 PM local time December 8, 2025. There is no additional 2-week late window. This notice applies to all relevant Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), including those that indicate no late applications will be accepted. Institutions need not request advance permission to submit late due to the government shutdown and a cover letter providing a justification is not required.

I am still not entirely sure who this is for and what the logic is for extending the deadline. The eRA commons submission system was working as normal during the slowdown for grant submissions. There was no particular reason to miss the normal deadlines as far as submitting the grant goes. The (NOT-OD-26-005) referred cryptically to “access to NIH staff and the help desks as they develop their applications“, but come on. Is this really a lot of proposals?

One suspects the major impact of this will be to allow people who weren’t actually ready to get their proposal submitted to get it in earlier. Or to allow those who were ready to prepare another proposal and submit it.

At my old place of employment, this would be no problem. I could whip out another* grant submission on short notice. At my current bureaucratically enhanced institution, this is not going to happen. Even if I had geared up based on that Nov 14 announcement it would have been a tough an impossible sell to my ridiculously long lead-time grant approval processes.

When the prior warning broke cover there was a little frisson on the twitts about how this was unfair to those of us who made deadline. meh. I am not really all that fussed about it, I don’t think this will amount to very many new proposals coming in. Maybe one per study section? Two? This can’t possibly affect our own chances* very much.

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*Note, there is nothing in the Notice that says these will be shoehorned into the same study sections in Feb/Mar, but I assume they will be. After all the continuous submission window runs to Dec 15 (I think) so this is not a major new ask.