NSF Launches New Automated Proposal Submission Compliance Checks

Effective August 1, 2016, all National Science Foundation (NSF) proposals will be subject to a new series of automated compliance validation checks to ensure proposals comply with requirements outlined in Chapter II.C.2. of the Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG).

Please note that the new set of compliance checks are in addition to the compliance checks that currently exist in FastLane. See the NSF website for a complete list of FastLane auto-compliance checks.

The list specifies which checks are run depending on funding opportunity type (GPG, Program Description, Program Announcement, or Program Solicitation) and type of proposal (Research, RAPID, EAGER, Ideas Lab, Conference, Equipment, International Travel, Facility/Center, or Fellowship). It also specifies whether the check triggers a “warning” or “error” message for non-compliant proposals.

The new set of automated compliance checks will trigger error messages for each of the following rules:

• Biographical Sketch(es) and Current and Pending Support files are required  for each Senior Personnel associated with a proposal; and
• Biographical Sketch(es) can only be uploaded as a file, must not exceed two pages and can no longer be entered as text.

For more information, see the NSF Automated Compliance Checking of NSF Proposals webpage.