All NIH electronic systems (NIH Commons, ASSIST, etc.) will be offline over Memorial Day weekend. The systems will be down from 9 p.m. on Friday, May 23 and are expected to be restored to service by Tuesday, May 27 at 7 a.m. to make them Unicode compatible.
What is Unicode compatible and why should investigators care? Unicode is a way that computers can understand all the modern characters of almost all the written languages in the world.
- As a result of this upgrade, eRA systems will be able to accept Greek characters as they appear in the original scientific text submitted by grantees. For instance, Greek characters will now appear in progress reports without resulting in garbled text.
- Because Unicode will support Greek and other scientific characters, the attachments in your application can be more accurately assigned for evaluation; reviewers will be able to better understand your goals and objectives; and NIH will be able to better categorize awards for reporting. Note that Grants.gov has not yet adopted Unicode, so until they do so you cannot use Unicode in any of the actual form fields.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Though investigators will be able to use special characters in information submitted directly into NIH systems, data fields in proposals submitted through Grants.gov are cannot contain special characters.
More information on this upgrade can be found at NOT-OD-14-071 (NIH Extramural Grant Systems Upgrade for Unicode Compatibility Means Memorial Day Weekend Downtime).