It wasn't so long ago that Scot Wolfe, assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, needed to check every page of his nearly 70-page National Institutes of Health grant application, to ensure that the copier hadn't smudged any of the required five copies. Then he would pack up the applications and send them by FedEx to Bethesda, Md. "I've blocked that out a little bit," says Wolfe.
When all US federal granting agencies came under the umbrella of the electronic submission portal, Grants.gov (http://grants.gov) in 2005, researchers and grant administrators alike breathed a sigh of relief.
Even though the government's new federal electronic submission system, PureEdge, is an improvement to paper submissions, the program is still considerably clunky, some users say. Researchers must enter their names manually in every section, they can't double click to open pages in the program, and they can't scroll through the page to ...