This Notice announces the continuing availability of administrative supplements to active awards that focus on biomedical software development or have a significant software development component. The goal of these supplements is to invest in research software tools with recognized value in a scientific community to enhance their impact by leveraging best practices and design principles in software development and advances in technology including cloud computing. This initiative is part of a plan for implementing the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science which describes actions aimed at modernizing the biomedical research data ecosystem to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) and provide robust, scalable, sustainable tools and workflows with high impact for open science. The supplements are intended to support and encourage collaborations between biomedical scientists and software engineers to enhance the design, implementation, and cloud-readiness of research software. Through these awards, the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) intends to help researchers who have developed scientifically valuable software to make their tools robust and sustainable, take advantage of new data science, software engineering, and computing paradigms, reach a broader community and contribute to open science.
The goal of this Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) is to encourage and enable researchers to engage in new types of collaborations that focus on improving the quality and sustainability of research software from a software engineering perspective. Supplements will support efforts that address robustness, sustainability, reusability, portability, and scalability of existing biomedical research software tools and workflows of recognized scientific value. The goal of the opportunity is to improve software engineering fundamentals, going beyond software hardening or high-level user interaction. These projects are expected to adhere to software engineering best practices and design principles and take significant steps toward open science and sustainability in modern computing environments such as cloud or hybrid, distributed computing, and workflow systems. Projects to improve software engineering of significant research tools are sought regardless of the scientific area of emphasis. However these projects should not direct effort towards new research functions and must be in scope of the funded grant for which the supplement is being sought.
Application Due Date(s) – April 12, 2022
NOT-OD-22-068
To be eligible, the parent award must be able to receive funds in FY2021 (Oct. 1, 2020 - Sept. 30, 2021) and not be in the final year or in a no-cost extension period at the time of the award.
Projects that have already received awards under NOT-OD-20-073 are NOT eligible for this NOSI.
One-time supplement budget requests cannot exceed $150,000 direct costs. The number of awards will be contingent on availability of funds and receipt of meritorious applications. It is currently anticipated that 15 awards or more will be made depending on available funds.
Additional funds may be awarded as supplements to parent awards using any Activity Code, with the following exceptions. Small business activity codes (e.g. R41, R42, R43, R44, U44, and Fast Track), as well as G20, PS1, P60, R13, U13, U42, UG1, and S10 are NOT ELIGIBLE. Note that not all participating NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) support all the activity codes that may otherwise be allowed. Applicants are therefore strongly encouraged to consult the program officer of the parent grant to confirm eligibility.
Centers and multi-project grant mechanisms are eligible but must provide a strong justification for why existing funds cannot be reallocated toward the proposed project.
For awards that are already primarily funded to deliver software resources to the community (e.g., R24, U24, P41), applicants should provide strong justification for why additional funds are needed to support software enhancement and best practices, given that these activities could already be supported through the parent award.
