eRA Commons Roles

What “eRA Commons roles” means

Every account in NIH’s Electronic Research Administration (eRA) system — the platform institutions and individuals use to prepare, submit, and manage NIH grant applications and awards — is assigned one or more roles. A role is a defined permission set: it determines what a given account can see and do inside eRA Commons and its connected modules (ASSIST for application preparation and submission, xTrain for trainee appointments, RPPR for progress reporting, and others). Roles are distinct from the underlying eRA Commons ID itself — the ID is the individual’s persistent login credential, while the role is what that credential is authorized to do, and a single person can hold more than one role, or have a role change over time as their position or responsibilities change.

Because eRA Commons roles determine who can legally commit an institution and who can submit a federal application on its behalf, the role structure is the practical mechanism through which NIH’s grants compliance model works: applications and reports move through named individuals with specific, auditable authority, rather than through an undifferentiated institutional account.

The administrative roles: who can act for the institution

A small set of roles carry institutional, rather than purely scientific, authority:

• Signing Official (SO) — the role with the broadest institutional authority in eRA Commons. The SO can legally bind the institution in grants administration matters, register the institution in eRA Commons in the first place, create and modify the institutional profile, and create every other account type, including additional SO accounts. Only the SO can formally submit an application or most post-award actions (such as certain no-cost extensions) to NIH on the institution’s behalf — a Principal Investigator can prepare and route an application, but cannot submit it without SO sign-off. The SO role is functionally equivalent to what NIH policy elsewhere calls the institution’s Authorized Organizational Representative (AOR).
• Administrative Official (AO) — supports institutional grants operations and can create most account types (though not SO, Business Official, or Financial Conflict of Interest accounts). A PI can delegate certain application-status and Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR) editing functions to an AO, so day-to-day administrative work can be handled without routing every action through the SO personally.
• Account Administrator (AA) — a narrower account-management role, able to create and edit most Commons accounts (again excluding SO, Business Official, and Financial Conflict of Interest/Internet Assisted Reviewer accounts). Many institutions use the AA role to handle routine registration of new PIs and trainees without granting those staff full AO authority.
• Business Official (BO) — handles financial and business-side certifications distinct from grants administration proper. A common example is certifying salary, citizenship, and protected-research-time information for NIH Loan Repayment Program (LRP) applicants through the LRP Institutional Business Official (IBO) Portal.

Scientific, trainee, and reporting roles

Most other eRA Commons roles are scoped to a specific scientific or reporting function rather than institutional authority:

• Principal Investigator (PI) — the Principal Investigator role, held by the person responsible and accountable to the recipient institution for the proper conduct of the project. A PI can initiate, edit, and (for most non-submission actions) manage their own applications and reports in eRA Commons.
• Assistant (ASST) — a delegate role a PI can assign to research administration staff, allowing them to view and edit the PI’s profile and assist with application and reporting tasks on the PI’s behalf, without that staff member holding the PI role itself.
• Trainee roles (e.g., Undergraduate, Graduate Student, Postdoc, Scientist, Project Personnel) — scoped narrowly to viewing the individual’s own personal profile and their institution’s profile; used for people named on training and career-development awards and tracked through xTrain.
• Financial Status Reporter (FSR) — authorized to initiate, view, edit, and submit Federal Financial Reports (FFR).
• Financial Conflict of Interest (FCOI) — manages an institution’s conflict-of-interest disclosure filings for NIH-funded projects.
• Public Access Compliance Reporter (PACR) — views, edits, and submits reports related to the NIH Public Access Policy.
• Internet Assisted Reviewer (IAR) — a role for scientific peer reviewers, granting access to the IAR module used in NIH’s review process rather than to an institution’s own application data.

How delegation actually works

Registration and role assignment in eRA Commons is institution-mediated, not self-service: an individual cannot create their own account or grant themselves a role. An SO or Account Administrator at an already-registered institution creates the account and assigns the appropriate role or roles. From there, several of the roles above exist specifically to let authority cascade downward for day-to-day efficiency without diluting who is ultimately accountable:

• A PI can delegate specific status-check, editing, or RPPR functions to an AO or an ASST, but delegation does not transfer the PI’s underlying scientific responsibility for the project.
• An SO can create AO, AA, BO, PI, and other accounts and can delegate day-to-day account administration to an AA, but only the SO (or another SO account) retains authority to bind the institution and to formally submit applications.
• Roles can be layered: a single person occasionally holds more than one role (for example, a research administrator might hold both AO and FSR roles), while large institutions more commonly split these across separate staff for internal separation-of-duties reasons.

This structure is why “who submits” and “who signs” are frequently different questions from “who wrote the application” in NIH grants administration: the PI is scientifically responsible and typically authors the content, but formal submission and legal commitment run through the SO, with AOs, AAs, and BOs handling defined slices of the administrative and financial work in between.

Related terms

See eRA Commons ID for the underlying account credential that a role is attached to, Principal Investigator for the scientific-responsibility role in more depth, and Designated Institutional Official (DIO) for a related but distinct NIH-specific compliance role (research-conduct oversight on training grants) that sits outside the eRA Commons role/permission structure described here. For the broader submission and reporting infrastructure these roles operate within, see the grants management pillar.