Office of Research Administration

Dear NIH Investigators,

As relayed in our communication of December 5th, the NIH will require the use of Common Forms created in SciENcv for all biosketches and other support documents for any applications, RPPRs or JITs due on or after 1/25/26. See NOT-OD-26-018.

The Common Forms are now available in SciENcv and can be generated and certified there. Here are some recommendations to ensure a smoother experience in SciENcv:

• Start early and if you do not have an ORCID, please create one. Some individuals are encountering technical difficulties with linking their ORCID, which is a required step. A common issues stems from having a duplicate NCBI account that is linked to your ORCID, blocking you from linking the ORCID to your current NCBI account. Merging the NCBI accounts requires Help Desk support.

• Additionally, you will need to link your ORCID to your eRA commons account to avoid an error upon submission.

• Due to character limitations and limits on the number of citations, you may need to reframe how you represent your scientific body of work.

• Formatting is a challenge - even adding line breaks requires the use of HTML tags.

• Check for errors by previewing your document early, leaving plenty of time for corrections, as text will display differently when downloaded as a PDF.

• Use naming conventions that include the date, FOA #, and type of award to ensure there are no mixups with certifying the incorrect documents.

Significant changes to Biosketches:

• Personal statements are limited to 3500 characters (including any ongoing and completed research projects you wish to highlight)

• Only 10 citations total can be included in the Common Form Biosketch (up to 5 most closely related to this project, which can be discussed in the personal statement, and up to 5 other significant citations that can be referenced in your contributions to science)

• Your Contributions to Science will not include full citations, but can refer to the 5 other significant products provided in the Common Form Biosketch

• While you can still include 5 narrative contributions to science, they are limited to 2000 characters each

• Honors/awards limited to 15 entries

• ORCIDs are required to be associated with your SciENcv account

• You will have to certify the document in order for a pre-award liaison to download it

• Page breaks and bolding will need to be made via HTML

Biosketch resources:

• From Brandeis Research Library Services: Biosketch Resources and Training - Research Guides at Brandeis University

• From Brandeis Research Library Services: Attached PowerPoint Presentation

• From DISC PreAward: SciENcv Biosketch FAQs

• From DISC PreAward: HTML Cheat Sheet for SciENcv Biosketch

• From NIH: Instructions to link ORCID ID with eRA Commons profiles

• From NIH: Common Forms for Biographical Sketch Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Significant changes to Other Support (similar to the current format used for NSF):

• NIH will no longer distinguish between academic and summer effort on these forms. It will all be counted as person-months.

• “Major Goals” will now be called “Overall Objectives” and be limited to 1500 characters

• Dollar values for in-kind support only need to be included if they are over $5000

• Statements of potential overlap will apply to individual proposals, rather than the overall document

Current and Pending (Other) Support resources:

• From NIH: Common Forms for Current and Pending (Other) Support Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

• From Northwestern University Library: Using SciENcv to Create an Other Support Document

Sincerely,