UPDATE:  The NSF has confirmed that awardees must stop submitting project reports in FastLane as of February 1, 2013.   NSF will transfer project reporting from FastLane to Research.gov on March 18, 2013.  The transition to Research.gov requires that reporting in FastLane be frozen; so, to assist grantees with this transition, the overdue date will be extended for all project reports that are currently scheduled to become overdue between January 31 and April 30, 2013.

Early in January, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will completely transfer all project reporting from FastLane to Research.gov.  We are advising all Principal Investigators (PIs) to complete project reports in process during the month of December, because the transition of reporting functions to Research.gov will leave any unfinished reports in Fastlane stranded and require you to re-start your report in Research.gov.

NSF has provided several resources to ease the transition, including the Project Reporting Factsheet, which provides an overview of the new reporting system, and the  Project Report Preview, which includes screenshots and instructions.   As mentioned in the Fact Sheet, PIs and Co-PIs will use Research.gov to meet all NSF project reporting requirements, including submission of Final, Interim, and Annual Project Reports and the Project Outcomes Report. 

NSF has listed some of the key benefits of the new reporting system to include:

• A consolidated project reporting dashboard that includes Annual, Final, Interim, and Project Outcomes Reports;
• The reduction of PI and co-PI burden through use of more innovative mechanisms to pre-populate parts of the report;
• A more structured collection of the project reports data for enhanced NSF use;
• A rich text editor that supports common scientific characters and symbols;
• The adoption of a federal-wide data dictionary to increase consistency of Research.gov implementation across agencies;
• PDF upload to support images, charts, and other complex graphics;
• Improved citation search through Thomson Web of Science;
• Special reporting requirements will be controlled by solicitation requirements; and
• PI will no longer be required to provide demographic information on significant participants.

Additional information about Research.gov and project reporting requirements is available:

• On the Research.gov webpage;
• Through a series of webinars highlighted on the Events wepage (Look for the RSS feed!); and
• On the Project Reports webpage.

If you have any questions or concerns, NSF is actively soliciting feedback about these changes.