As outlined in Dear Colleague Letter (NSF 20-129), submissions to the Directorate of Biological Sciences (BIO) programs have begun migrating to Research.gov. Starting January 5, 2021, the Division of Environmental Biology’s Core Programs’ solicitation will no longer be available in FastLane and any new proposals must be submitted through Research.gov or Grants.gov.  Proposals started in FastLane have the option to be submitted in FastLane or you can start your proposal over in Research.gov or Grants.gov. Unfortunately, it is not possible to transfer proposal information from FastLane to Research.gov or Grants.gov. Please keep in mind that any proposal file updates or budget revisions must also be executed in the system you submit your proposal

During the week of October 19, BIO Program Officers held a series of virtual office hours to assist the community through this change. The slides from the office hours are linked below.

• Slides (PDF)

NSF recently released a proposal preparation demonstration site, which provides proposers the opportunity to create Research.gov proposals in the role of a Principal Investigator (PI) prior to preparing and submitting proposals in the actual Research.gov Proposal Submission System. All research community demo site users must sign in to Research.gov to access the demo site. For further demo site details, please see the Research.gov advisory and demo site Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) available via the Research.gov About Proposal Preparation and Submission page left navigation menu. A set of topic-specific video tutorials is also available.

If you have any questions regarding the migration process, please reach out to your cognizant Program Officer; the Program Officer for the program to which you are applying; or BIOnodeadline@nsf.gov, which is monitored by Program Officers from across BIO. Technical support and FAQs and videos on proposal submission through Research.gov are also available.

 If you have IT system-related questions, please contact the NSF Help Desk at 1-800-381-1532 (7:00 AM – 9:00 PM ET; Monday – Friday except federal holidays) or via rgov@nsf.gov. Policy-related questions should be directed to policy@nsf.gov.

If you would like to stay up to date on future enhancements to Research.gov and important information about FastLane, please subscribe to NSF’s System Updates listserv by simply sending a blank email to system_updates-subscribe-request@listserv.nsf.gov and you will be automatically enrolled.