Announcement to the Guelph Health Research community regarding upcoming changes re: CIHR

1. New Common CV - CIHR will only accept applications with the new common CV as of September, 2012.  Approximately  90% of the information in the old common CV accounts have been migrated over to the new common CV server.  While there are still a number of glitches and irritations that the communication experts at CIHR are trying to fix, every potential applicant must now move access their CV modules to do an update.
2. CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship applications will be changed from two competitions to one competition per year as of Fall 2013.  The next competitions will be Fall 2012, Spring 2013, and Fall 2013.  After that it will only be once a year in the Fall.
3. A decision has been made by the CIHR Governing Council to launch the separate Program and Project schemes of operating grant applications.  Their decision is based on responses from online feedback comments and townhall meetings.  Apparently, they are satisfied with the amount of support to launch these two new schemes of operating grant applications, although there are still plenty of researchers who are against this proposed change.  From the last face-to-face meeting of the CIHR UDs in Ottawa on June 12, there were lots of objections to the proposed program/project schemes.  
4. Pilots of a new format of "structured" peer reviewing have been tested in two New Investigator (NI) Award competitions in the past year. Chris Whitfield was member of the review committee of the NI applications, and has provided insight at a recent townhall meeting of U of Guelph, U of Waterloo, and Wilfried Laurier U with Jane Aubin, VP Research of CIHR. 

The start dates for these new program/project schemes and peer review systems is unknown at this time, but they are coming soon!  More details to follow.