Office of Extramural Research (OER)

The Office of Extramural Research (OER) is the component of the NIH Office of the Director that owns the corporate, NIH-wide infrastructure, policy, and systems for extramural research administration — the shared functions that apply across every grant-awarding NIH Institute and Center (IC), rather than any single IC’s own programmatic funding decisions. In practice, OER is where most of what a research administrator experiences as “NIH grants policy” actually comes from: the electronic Research Administration (eRA) systems, the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts, and the NIH Grants Policy Statement.

What OER Actually Owns

• eRA — the Office of eRA runs eRA Commons, ASSIST, and Reporter, the systems used to submit, track, and manage NIH applications and awards. Registering an institution or a Signing Official (SO)/Program Director (PD) role in Commons is an OER-run process, not something an individual Institute administers separately.
• The NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts — NIH’s official channel for policy notices and funding announcements, issued as NOT-OD-YY-### (policy/administrative notices) or as Funding Opportunity Announcements. See CASRAI’s Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) entry for how RFAs and Program Announcements themselves work.
• The NIH Grants Policy Statement — the terms and conditions that apply to every NIH award, developed and maintained by OER’s Division of Grants Policy.
• The Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration (OPERA) — houses the Division of Grants Policy (DGP), which develops, executes, and interprets NIH’s financial-assistance policy for grants and cooperative agreements.
• Cross-NIH extramural integrity and workforce policy — including research-integrity threats (misconduct, breaches of peer-review confidentiality, undisclosed foreign support), data sharing policy implementation, and training/career-development workforce analysis.

OER describes its own role as supporting the entire extramural community — applicants, awardee institutions, and the 24 grant-awarding NIH ICs alike — with this shared policy and systems layer, rather than running any Institute’s individual funding programs.

OER vs. an Institute’s Own Extramural Staff

OER sets the NIH-wide framework — but the program officers and grants management specialists who make funding recommendations, negotiate award terms, and answer applicant questions about a specific opportunity work for the individual IC (e.g., NCI, NIAID, NIA), not for OER directly. A funding decision on a particular application is an IC decision made within OER’s shared policy and systems framework, not an OER decision itself.

OER vs. the Center for Scientific Review (CSR)

OER does not conduct scientific peer review. The study sections that evaluate an application’s scientific merit and assign its impact score sit within the Center for Scientific Review (CSR) — a separate NIH organizational unit that, since NIH centralized first-level peer review there in 2025, now handles review for essentially all NIH grant and cooperative-agreement applications. OER and CSR coordinate closely (the NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research role bridges both), and OER sets policy that peer review operates within — conflict-of-interest rules, confidentiality requirements, review-integrity safeguards — but CSR, not OER, actually convenes and manages the review panels.

Where a Research Administrator Actually Encounters OER

Most day-to-day contact with OER is indirect, through the systems and notices it maintains rather than direct correspondence:

• eRA Commons — submitting Just-in-Time information, viewing a Notice of Award, checking a summary statement, or (for a research administrator overseeing loan-repayment awards) working through the eRA Commons LRP portal described in CASRAI’s NIH Loan Repayment Program (LRP) guide.
• NOT-OD Guide Notices — the mechanism through which NIH-wide policy changes are announced. Two recent, concrete examples: NOT-OD-25-101 set the effective date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy (removing the prior 12-month embargo for NIH-funded manuscripts), and NOT-OD-26-044 set FY2026 stipend, tuition, and institutional-allowance levels for Kirschstein-NRSA trainees and fellows (including F31 predoctoral fellowships).
• Standardized disclosure formats mandated through the Grants Policy Statement and related notices, such as Other Support (NIH format).
• Cross-cutting scientific policy, such as the NIH Rigor and Reproducibility policy, which OER helps implement NIH-wide.
• FOAs and RFAs themselves — see CASRAI’s NIH RFA guide for how these are indexed in the NIH Guide and mirrored on Grants.gov.

References

• NIH Office of Extramural Research, “About Us,” grants.nih.gov/aboutoer.
• NIH OER, “Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration (OPERA),” grants.nih.gov/aboutoer/oer-offices/opera.
• NIH OER, “Office of eRA,” grants.nih.gov/aboutoer/oer-offices/era.
• NIH, “NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts,” grants.nih.gov/funding/nih-guide-for-grants-and-contracts.
• NOT-OD-25-101, “Revision: Notice of Updated Effective Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy.”
• NOT-OD-26-044, “Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Stipends, Tuition/Fees and Other Budgetary Levels Effective for Fiscal Year 2026.”
• NIH Center for Scientific Review, “About CSR,” public.csr.nih.gov/AboutCSR.