Key Dates

Related Announcements

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Issued by

NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH (NIH)

Purpose

Background

This Notice alerts the extramural research community that as part of the NIH's ongoing efforts to increase efficiency and minimize applicant burden, it is aligning its letter of support requirements in applications with the format currently used by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NIH letters of support will be replaced with letters of collaboration. Currently, letters of support for NIH applications may come from a variety of stakeholders, including collaborators, institutions, potential users of a resource, or any other interested parties, and can be a page or more in length. 

Policy 

With the implementation of Forms J in Fiscal Year 2027, the NIH will no longer allow letters of support but will instead require letters of collaboration to document any collaborative relationships with individuals that are not identified in the application as senior/key personnel or other significant contributors. Because senior/key personnel and other significant contributors must provide biosketches in the application, letters of collaboration from them are unnecessary and burdensome. Letters of collaboration will also be used to document other relevant contributions to the project's success, such as Material Transfer Agreements. 

Letters designed to endorse the application without an intent to collaborate or provide material support will no longer be permitted in NIH grant applications. Letters of collaboration should not be provided from trainees or staff in the laboratory of the Program Director/Principal Investigator(s), including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and technicians. When Forms J are implemented, applicants should disregard any NOFO-specific instructions regarding content pertaining to Letters of Support as those instructions will be superseded by the new guidance. Applications that continue to include letters of support after the implementation date may be returned without review. 

Letters of collaboration should be limited to stating the intent to collaborate or provide material support as described in the application and should not contain endorsements or additional information about or evaluations of the proposed project. An individual letter of collaboration must not exceed 100 words. NIH encourages applicants to use the following single-sentence format for letters of collaboration.

For all applications except for fellowships:

"If the application submitted by [Organization Name and with PD/PI Name] as Program Director/Principal Investigator entitled [Grant Application Title] is selected for funding by NIH, it is my intent to collaborate and/or commit resources as detailed in the application."

For fellowship applications: 

"If the fellowship application submitted by [Fellow Name] entitled [Fellowship Application Title] is selected for funding by NIH, it is my intent to collaborate and/or commit resources as detailed in the application."

For training grant applications, applicants will use a separate form to upload the Institutional Commitment Letter. This process will be described in the Forms J instructions.

NIH will revise the application forms along with instructions to replace "Letters of Support" with "Letters of Collaboration." Further details will be issued prior to implementation. 

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to:

NIH Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration (OPERA)
Division of Grants Policy
Email: [email protected].