All good things must come to an end! In our case HFSP will stop using its proposal submission system that was developed some 15 years ago and in spring 2021, will move to ProposalCentral, a cloud-based solution for proposal submission and post-award management developed by Altum (Reston, VA), a scientific software enterprise.
HFSP is currently developing the online interface for research grants and postdoctoral fellowships. In moving to a new platform, applicants, awardees and reviewers for HFSP funding programs will have access to their HFSP records and any other records they have established with other funders, who are also clients of the multi-tenant ProposalCentral solution.
During the transition to ProposalCentral, HFSP will apply strict rules of confidentiality for private data to comply with the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR). Personal records will be anonymised for data migration and HFSP awardees will be able to retrieve their HFSP record to establish their user account in ProposalCentral.
The change of system brings many advantages for both our work and for members of the HFSP community. Online applications for HFSP research grants and fellowships will fully integrate with ORCID and therefore make registration and the completion of applications easier. The uploading of publications for research proposals has never been more simple and, as a funder, HFSP also hopes to benefit from the manifold possibilities to monitor research outcomes. In this regard, HFSP is now a registered funder with CrossRef, a not-for-profit organisation that improves scholarly communication by assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to awards and research outcomes. The use of DOIs enables not only individual scientists but also funding organisations to make more use of research outputs by making it easier to find, cite, link, assess and reuse results.