Both Grants.gov and certain agencies, particularly NIH, have guidelines for attachment format and certain PDF-specific requirements. Cayuse recommends complying with Grants.gov and agency guidelines whenever possible, and always verifying the content of your proposal after submission to ensure that it was transmitted correctly.
Creating PDFs
If you need to create a PDF from another documents (including creating 'flat' PDFs from PDFs with active fields), you can use a PDF creation utility, either a standalone program such as those recommended by Grants.gov, or built-in features such as the "Save as PDF" feature in Mac OS X and in Microsoft Word 2007 and later. If you are using a standalone program, simply printing the document to PDF again after opening it in the program is usually enough to flatten active fields as well as comments and stamps (see below).
Cayuse Proposals will automatically change special characters (such as &, -, *, %, / ,# , periods, spaces, and accented characters) in PDF file names to underscores, so no alterations should be required. Attachment names should be no longer than 36 characters.
Note: When attaching a document, be sure that you do not attach a blank document by mistake.
NIH (eRA Commons) PDF Requirements
In addition to the requirements for submission through Grants.gov, the NIH has extensive recommendations for successful PDF submission. Cayuse suggests that you pay special attention to Guidelines 2, 3, 6 and 7:
- Avoid 'bundling' multiple PDFs into a single file. For instructions on attaching Letters of Support, see below.
- Avoid producing PDFs by scanning printed documents. Use recommended PDF creation software instead.
- Disable any security features such as encryption or password requirements.
- Do not attach PDFs that contain "stamps" (commonly used for signatures) or other comments. Such PDFs may not be correctly transmitted to the eRA Commons, or may cause errors in other attached documents.
The NIH also requires special preparation for the Research Plan attachment. Cayuse 424 provides a tool to make this preparation easier by allowing a single document to be "exploded" into individual section during the attachment process. See Preparing the Research Plan for more information.