NIH announced a delay for the requirements for the Common Forms, SciENcv and ORCiD
In July 2024, the NIH announced a requirement (NOT-OD-24-163) for all grant proposals to use federal Common Forms for the NIH biosketch and for the Other Support document, and that these documents must be prepared using the NIH platform SciENcv. The date for this mandated use of SciENcv was set for all proposals due on or after May 25, 2025. The NIH would also require, on the same date, each senior and key personnel applicant to have an ORCiD, and to link their ORCiD to their eRA Commons account (if the investigator has an existing Commons account).
However, the NIH recently announced they are postponing the SciENcv requirement, with no new date put forth for implementation.
Investigators are instructed to continue using the current NIH biosketch templates available from the NIH Grants & Funding pages and the current Other Support format. (The current NIH biosketch is also available in SciENcv, but its use is optional, not mandatory.)
At Galter Library, in partnership with Northwestern Sponsored Research and our Research Administration Professionals, we are continuing to monitor the NIH biosketch and ORCiD changes, and we will alert our users as soon as we know more.
In the meantime, though, we should not delay on Northwestern’s effort for our investigators to acquire ORCiD IDs, link them to their NU NetIDs, link them to their Northwestern Elements profiles (for faculty) and link them to their eRA Commons accounts and their NCBI accounts. Many departments at the university are already working with researchers to link their ORCIDs to their other accounts. ORCIDs are currently required by eRA Commons as persistent identifiers for all NIH fellowship applications, career development grants, and current trainees. We expect that the ORCiD requirement for ALL NIH grant applicants will happen soon.
We also are continuing to teach our SciENcv and ORCiD classes at Galter Library, although we are stressing that the NIH does not yet require the use of the SciENcv biosketch platform. We think it’s important to prepare our community for the change, and now we have more time for these preparations.
Updated: April 10, 2025