Grants & You Summer 2020: COVID-19 News

Between late February and mid-April, Academic Medicine received ~80 submissions from authors around the world seeking to disseminate knowledge about conducting patient care, health professions education, and research during the COVID-19 pandemic. The editorial team is facilitating the process for COVID-19 content in the following ways:

• Expedited review process
• Expedited publication process
• Freely accessible content
• Dedicated article collection on academicmedicine.org
• Open submission process
• Call for trainee-authored letters to the editor
• Complementary content

Full details are available here.

As stay-at-home orders shuttered university labs, directors faced unprecedented questions: What research was allowed to continue and what stopped? What science is likely to be lost? Who will pay to resume experiments? The Association of American Medical Colleges discusses the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on research labs (link).

Sally Amero, PhD, NIH Review Policy Officer and Extramural Research Integrity Liaison Officer

NIH released guidance for peer reviewers clarifying that reviewers should assume issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the following, will be resolved prior to award and not allow concerns about temporary, emergency situations to affect grant application scores.

• Some key personnel on grant applications may be called to serve in patient testing or patient care roles, diverting effort from the proposed research.
• Feasibility of the proposed approach may be affected, for example if direct patient contact is required.
• The environment may not be functional or accessible.
• Additional human subjects protections may be in order, for example if the application was submitted prior to the outbreak.
• Animal welfare may be affected, if institutions are closed temporarily.
• Biohazards may include insufficient protections for research personnel.
• Recruitment plans and inclusion plans may be delayed, if certain patient populations are affected by the outbreak.
• Travel for key personnel or trainees to attend scientific conferences, meetings of consortium leadership, etc., may be postponed temporarily.
• Curricula proposed in training grant applications may have to be converted to online formats temporarily.
• Conferences proposed in R13/U13 applications may be canceled or postponed.

Additional details can be found at the Open Mike blog and NIH's central repository of COVID-19 resources.