Office of Research Administration

Important NIH Update: Common Forms for Biosketch and Other Support

December 5, 2025

Dear NIH Investigators,

Earlier this week, the NIH released NOT-OD-26-018, which officially requires the common forms and SciENcv for all biosketches and other support documents for any applications, RPPRs or JITs due on or after 1/25/26. The form is expected to be available for use the week of 12/15. 

We have highlighted significant changes below, but we encourage you to read the notice and familiarize yourself with the new guidelines. With this new system, it will be very important to use naming conventions that include the date, FOA #, and type of award to ensure there are no mixups with certifying the incorrect documents.

What you can do now:

  • Add your ORCID to your eRA commons profile, if you have not already done so. 
  • If you don't have an ORCID, you must obtain one. This will be a requirement for NIH applications going forward. Please reach out if you need assistance and see the bottom of this email for the link.
  • Preview the changes at SciENcv, particularly the “NIH Biographical Sketch PREVIEW Common Form” and “NIH Current and Pending (Other) Support PREVIEW Common Form.”

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 markdown text. Please see the links below for additional information. 

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

Keep these changes in mind as you update your Biosketches going forward.  If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your DISC Pre-Award liaison or discpreaward@brandeis.edu.

RESOURCES

Here are some some helpful reference links:

Biosketch Resources and Training - Research Guides at Brandeis University
Associate your ORCID with your eRA Commons Personal Profile 
Markdown Cheatsheet · adam-p/markdown-here Wiki · GitHub


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DISC Pre-Award Team
Office of Research Administration