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GMAS Retraction Criteria

Effective Date: May 1, 2024
Responsible Office: Office for Sponsored Programs, Proposal Review Team

Guidance Statement

This guidance document outlines the GMAS Retraction criteria for initial requests and competing renewals under review with the Proposal Review Team. 

Reason for Guidance

The prevalence of “rolling” or “target” deadlines is having a downstream impact on the review process whereby the OSP Proposal Review Team (PRT) is frequently seeing proposals sit for weeks on end awaiting final versions and PI approval to submit. Because of this impact, effective 5/1/24 the PRT will be implementing a review model where any initial or competing request, including anything retroactive,  which has not been advanced to submitted to sponsor within 30 calendar days of the original lock and route date will be retracted and new signatures will be required. When the retracted submission is complete and has been locked and routed again, it will be assigned to a reviewer in the order received and subject again to the University Five Business Day Review Policy.

  1. The PI originally signed off on documentation that has lingered and/or changed.  Per the GMAS certification language, the PI signature should be attesting to the accuracy of the proposal documents which may no longer be the versions originally approved.
  2. There is a negative impact on the review queue when the PI approves submission after long periods of inactivity because the reviewer needs to fit the application back into the active queue for re-review.  This moves proposals out of the order received to accommodate a second review.  To mitigate this potential impact and ensure that all are reviewed in the order received, the retracted proposal will again be subject to the University Five Business Day Review Policy. 
  3. Proposals which have been locked and routed but have been awaiting PI or Grants Manager action for a prolonged period inflate the queue which is detrimental to assessing reviewer capacity for new proposals as well as when providing the number of active proposals ahead of a submission when there is an exception under review.
  4. The Reviewer completes their review and provides their comments.  They are then required to follow up multiple times on the status of final versions but are not cleared to submit. This results in an inordinate amount of time being spent on a proposal which is either not ready or is not time sensitive.

Retraction Criteria

  • Research team members listed are incorrect and require additional personnel to be added
  • Cost sharing was not originally included in the GMAS request but should have been, or, was incorrect
  • International Collaboration Activities section was not completed or was incorrect
  • Subcontract Module was not completed (for a proposal that includes a sub)
  • Interfaculty involvement was not completed or was incorrect
  • Substantial edits to Proposed Budget Module are required. Examples of substantial edits may include but are not limited to changing multiple budget years within GMAS, adding/revising IDC, adding or deleting a budget year
  • Requests under review which have Timed Out upon reaching 30 calendar days from the lock and route date

REMINDER: OSP cannot log any signatures present prior to the retraction.