How to Complete the R&R Other Project Information Form for NIH Grants

The R&R Other Project Information Form is a required component of every SF-424 (R&R) application package submitted to the NIH through ASSIST or Grants.gov. It does two jobs: it collects yes-or-no compliance answers about human subjects, animals, proprietary data, environmental impact, historic sites, and foreign activities, and it holds the upload slots for several mandatory PDF attachments including your Project Summary, Project Narrative, and Bibliography. A wrong answer or a malformatted attachment can trigger administrative withdrawal before a reviewer sees your science, so accuracy on this form matters as much as the strength of your research plan.

The Six Compliance Questions

Each “Yes” answer opens additional fields you must complete before the form will validate. Answer honestly and completely; several of these certifications carry legal weight after award.

Question 1: Human Subjects

If your project involves human subjects, select “Yes” and indicate whether the project qualifies for an exemption from federal regulations. If it does, check the applicable exemption category (numbered 1 through 8). If it does not, indicate whether Institutional Review Board review is pending or already approved, enter the IRB approval date if you have one, and enter your institution’s Human Subject Assurance Number.

You do not need IRB approval in hand at submission. The NIH collects IRB certification later through the Just-in-Time process for applications that score well enough to be considered for funding. Your institution’s assurance number, however, must be active when you submit. An expired or missing assurance can lead to administrative withdrawal.

Question 2: Vertebrate Animals

If your project uses live vertebrate animals, select “Yes” and indicate whether Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee review is pending or complete. Enter the IACUC approval date if available, and provide your institution’s Animal Welfare Assurance Number. As with human subjects, IACUC approval can be finalized during Just-in-Time, but the Animal Welfare Assurance Number must be current at submission.

Question 3: Proprietary Information

This question asks whether the application contains patentable ideas, trade secrets, or confidential commercial or financial information. NIH instructions are clear: include this type of information only when it is necessary for reviewers to understand the proposed project. If you check “Yes,” mark every line or paragraph containing proprietary material with a statement along the lines of “The following contains proprietary/privileged information that [applicant name] requests not be released to persons outside the government, except for purposes of review and evaluation.”¹

If you fail to flag proprietary content at submission, you will need a substantial justification to withhold it later if someone files a Freedom of Information Act request after award. Marking “Yes” does not automatically shield the information; the NIH makes the final call on disclosure. But it puts the agency on notice that the material needs special handling.¹

Question 4: Environmental Impact

Most NIH research grants do not have a significant environmental impact, and categorical exclusions let most applicants answer “No.” Answer “Yes” only if your project falls into one of several specific scenarios: work that threatens to violate environmental protection laws, involves especially hazardous substances with unknown controls, may overload waste treatment facilities, could affect endangered species, or introduces new sources of radiation or hazardous waste.¹

A “Yes” opens explanation fields limited to 55 characters each where you describe the actual or potential impact and note whether an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement has been performed. Grant recipients also have to notify the NIH promptly if reasonably foreseeable environmental impacts emerge after award.²

Question 5: Historic Places

Question 5 asks whether any research performance site is designated, or eligible to be designated, as a historic place. If you are conducting work in a building or at a site listed on (or potentially eligible for) the National Register of Historic Places, check “Yes” and provide an explanation. For most laboratory-based research at modern institutions, the answer is “No.”¹

Question 6: Foreign Activities

Select “Yes” if your project involves activities outside the United States or partnerships with international collaborators. The NIH defines a foreign component as the performance of any significant scientific element of a project outside the United States, whether or not grant funds are spent on it.³ Qualifying activities include collaborations expected to result in co-authorship, use of foreign facilities or instruments, and extensive foreign travel for data collection or sampling. Routine foreign travel for consultation alone does not count.⁴

If you answer “Yes,” list the countries involved and provide an optional explanation. Be thorough. If foreign involvement surfaces after award that was not disclosed at application, it can delay funding and raise compliance concerns under current research security policies.

The Mandatory PDF Attachments

The lower portion of the form contains upload slots for several PDF attachments. Each has its own content and length requirements. Treat these as individually graded components: a strong research plan can still be sunk by a vague Project Summary or a missing Bibliography.

Project Summary/Abstract

The Project Summary is a 30-line overview describing the long-term objectives, specific aims, and methods of your research along with the project’s health relevance and significance.⁵ If the grant is funded, the NIH publishes this abstract through RePORTER, so leave out proprietary information and descriptions of past accomplishments.⁶ Write it at a level a scientist in a related field can follow. This is the document reviewers read first when deciding how to categorize and assign your application.

Project Narrative

The Project Narrative is limited to three sentences explaining how your project will improve health outcomes.⁵ Unlike the Summary, the Narrative targets a general audience and is also published through RePORTER. It should be readable by someone without a science background. Three sentences is all you get, so make each one count.

Bibliography and References Cited

List every publication you cited in the Research Strategy and other sections of the application. There is no page limit, but include only works you actually referenced. It is not a literature review. Use a consistent citation format throughout.

Facilities and Other Resources

Describe the institutional environment supporting your project: laboratories, clinical space, office space, computing resources, and any shared core facilities your team will use. This attachment should demonstrate that your institution has the physical infrastructure to carry out the work. If your institution has unique strengths relevant to the project, such as a specialized biobank, a patient cohort, or proximity to a field site, highlight them here.

Equipment

List major pieces of equipment already available for the project. Focus on significant items like mass spectrometers, sequencers, imaging systems, and high-performance computing clusters. If critical equipment is not currently owned by the institution, explain how you will access it through shared-use agreements or include its cost in the budget.

Authentication of Key Biological and Chemical Resources

If your research relies on established biological or chemical resources such as cell lines, specialty chemicals, or antibodies, you need a one-page plan describing how you will verify their identity and quality before use and at regular intervals during the project. For cell lines, this typically means short tandem repeat profiling and mycoplasma testing. For chemicals, describe the analytical method you will use, such as chromatography or mass spectrometry.⁷

Keep this attachment strictly about authentication methods. Do not include research data, authentication plans for databases or standard reagents like buffers, or plans for developing new resources. Applications that stray from these limits are treated as non-compliant and withdrawn from review.⁷

Data Management and Sharing Plan

Every NIH application must include a Data Management and Sharing Plan describing how you will manage and share the scientific data generated by the project. The NIH introduced a pilot DMS Plan format for 2026 that uses a structured questionnaire and data table rather than the previous free-text format.⁸ Download the current blank format page from the NIH website and follow the accompanying instructions.

Your plan should address whether you will share scientific data underlying publications by the time of publication, name the repositories where data will be deposited, and explain any limitations on sharing due to privacy, legal, or technical constraints. If the project involves human participants, describe how you will protect their privacy when sharing data. Budget the costs of data management and sharing in your Budget Justification rather than in the DMS Plan itself.

Formatting Rules for Every PDF Attachment

Every attachment on this form has to meet the same formatting standards. Getting these wrong is an avoidable reason for the application to be flagged or returned.⁹

Font size: 11 points or larger for all text. Smaller text in figures, graphs, and diagrams is acceptable if it remains legible at 100% zoom.
Font types: Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, and Palatino Linotype are recommended. Other serif and sans-serif fonts are acceptable if they meet the size requirement.
Line spacing: No more than six lines per vertical inch.
Paper size: Standard letter, 8½ by 11 inches.
Margins: At least half an inch on all four sides. No applicant-supplied information can appear in the margins.
Flattened PDFs: All PDFs must be flattened, meaning all layers are merged into one, to prevent errors in the eRA system. Watch for fillable form fields, electronic signatures, and inserted text boxes that create hidden layers.

Filenames

Save each attachment with a descriptive filename of 50 characters or fewer, including spaces. Filenames must be unique across the application. Single spaces between words are allowed; do not use double spaces, do not start a filename with a space, and do not place one immediately before the .pdf extension. Avoid ampersands, which require special encoding. Allowed characters include letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens, periods, parentheses, and most common symbols.⁹

Research Security Certifications on Related Forms

The R&R Other Project Information Form itself does not collect the foreign talent recruitment certification, but the same application package does, and the two sit close enough that applicants often confuse them. Starting in 2026, under the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, anyone identified as senior or key personnel on an NIH grant must certify that they are not currently a party to a malign foreign talent recruitment program. That certification appears on the Biographical Sketch Common Form attached to the R&R Senior/Key Person Profile, and the institution’s Authorized Organization Representative must also certify on the SF424 R&R cover form that all senior/key personnel have been informed of and complied with the requirement.¹⁰ Individuals currently party to such a program are ineligible to serve as senior or key personnel on any NIH grant or cooperative agreement.¹¹

After You Upload: Submission and the Viewing Window

Once all compliance questions are answered and PDFs uploaded, the institutional signing official (not the principal investigator) submits the complete application package through ASSIST or Grants.gov. After submission, the eRA system assembles a consolidated document image of your application forms and attachments and places it in eRA Commons.

The signing official then has a two-business-day viewing window to check the assembled application for problems like missing attachments or garbled text. During that window, the signing official can revise or reject (withdraw) the application. After the window closes, the application moves to NIH receipt and referral staff for processing.¹²

There is a catch. If the application was submitted close to the receipt deadline, the viewing window shrinks to whatever time remains before the deadline rather than a full two business days.¹³ Submitting a day or two early gives you the full window to catch assembly errors without a ticking deadline. Given how many ways this form can be quietly wrong, that cushion is the single easiest thing you can do to protect the application.

1
National Institutes of Health. G.220 – R&R Other Project Information Form
2
National Institutes of Health. NIH Grants Policy Statement – National Environmental Policy Act
3
National Institutes of Health. NOT-OD-25-155 – New Application Structure for NIH-Funded International Collaborations
4
National Institutes of Health. Applications with Foreign Components
5
National Institutes of Health. Page Limits
6
National Institutes of Health. Advice on Application Sections
7
National Institutes of Health. Reminder – Authentication of Key Biological and/or Chemical Resources
8
National Institutes of Health. Data Management and Sharing Plan Format Page
9
National Institutes of Health. Format Attachments
10
National Institutes of Health. NOT-OD-26-018 – NIHs Implementation of Common Forms for Biographical Sketch and Current and Pending (Other) Support for Due Dates on or after January 25, 2026
11
National Institutes of Health. NOT-OD-25-154 – Implementation of NIH Research Security Policies
12
National Institutes of Health. How to Submit, Track, and View Your Application
13
eRA Commons. Bypassing the 2-Business-Day Application Viewing Window for Administrative Supplements