(2007-06-01) Over the last two years, CIHR has made a number of developments to standardize and improve the functionality around presenting CIHR's funding opportunities to the research community. In response to requests to offer more searching and browsing capabilities, I am pleased to announce the launch of the CIHR Funding Opportunities Database.

This database will:

• give researchers and research administrators a search engine to find opportunities of interest and provide more browsing options. In addition to seeing opportunities by CIHR Institute/Portfolio, you will be able to search opportunities by the type of funding opportunity (e.g., Doctoral Research Award, Fellowship, Operating Grant), type of applicant (e.g., Clinicians, Doctoral Students, Researchers), application deadline date, and launch date;
• allow researchers and research administrators to view a master list of all current funding opportunities;
• allow researchers and research administrators to browse current and archived funding opportunities by type of funding opportunity, by CIHR Institute, and by type of applicant;
• enable researchers and research administrators to "watch" selected opportunities which allows you to receive more timely information on changes to opportunities and notification of upcoming deadlines;
• allow researchers and research administrators the ability to notify others of specific funding opportunities; and
• provide better integration with ResearchNet features such as e-Submission and e-Review.

We have also finished standardizing the presentation of all our funding opportunities to make it easier for researchers and research administrators to locate relevant information within the description of the funding opportunity. For example, the Operating Grant Program description is more explicit now that it has been re-written in the standardized format. CIHR's full offering of programs will be available in the Funding Opportunity Database at the mid-July 2007 launch of funding opportunities (e.g., Canada Graduate Master's Scholarships (2007-2008), Clinician-Scientist (2007-2008), Doctoral Research Awards (2007-2008), Fellowships (2007-2008), Health Professional Student Awards (2007-2008), New Investigator Salary Award (2007-2008), Proof of Principle (2007-2008), Randomized Controlled Trials, etc.).

Re-naming of the "CIHR Funding Database" to "CIHR Funded Research Database"

Many of you are familiar with the CIHR Funding Database which provides information on research that CIHR has funded. We are changing this name to CIHR Funded Research Database.

We have chosen this name so that this database relating to research which CIHR has funded is not confused with the new CIHR Funding Opportunity Database which lists the descriptions of funding opportunities.

Feedback

The launch of the new CIHR Funding Opportunity Database represents a "first step" in consolidating our funding opportunities within a database and providing added functionality that a database can offer. Future modifications to this database will occur based on user feedback and ongoing developments.

We are interested in your feedback and suggestions, so please fill out the online Survey or send your comments and suggestions to support@researchnet-recherchenet.ca

Pierre Chartrand, Ph.D.
Vice-President, Research Portfolio