The Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) document is a disclosure required from every senior/key person named on an NSF proposal. NSF uses it during merit review to check reviewers for conflicts of interest before they are assigned to a proposal, and after award, to help identify conflicts in program management. It is a distinct document from the NSF Biographical Sketch and from Synergistic Activities, prepared in a different format and submitted through a different mechanism — a distinction that trips up a lot of proposal teams because all three documents are collected together in Research.gov’s Senior Personnel Documents section.
What the COA Is For
NSF’s own framing is direct: the COA “is used in the merit review process to help manage reviewer selection.” When NSF’s program office is choosing reviewers for a proposal, it cross-checks each candidate reviewer’s name against the COA disclosures of the proposal’s senior/key personnel. A name that appears on both sides — a co-author, a Ph.D. advisor, someone barred by a personal or business relationship — disqualifies that person as a reviewer for that proposal. The same information can also surface a conflict during award management, for example when NSF staff assign a program officer or convene a panel. It is a conflict-of-interest control mechanism, not a biographical or scientific-merit document, which is why its required content looks so different from a CV.
Who Must Submit One
Every individual identified as senior/key personnel on an NSF proposal — the PI, co-PIs, and any other named senior personnel — must submit a COA document as part of that person’s Senior Personnel Documents. It is submitted per person, not once per proposal team: each senior/key person discloses their own collaborators and affiliations, not a combined roster for the whole project.
Required Format: NSF’s Fillable .xlsx Template
Unlike the NSF Biographical Sketch and Current and Pending (Other) Support — both of which moved to mandatory SciENcv preparation for proposals submitted or due on or after October 23, 2023 — the COA is not prepared in SciENcv. NSF requires its own fillable Collaborators and Other Affiliations template, distributed as an .xlsx spreadsheet from nsf.gov. The template’s content and format requirements must not be altered: proposers fill in the required fields but do not restructure the tables, rename columns, or change the file format.
Submission mechanism depends on how the proposal itself is being submitted:
- Research.gov proposals: the completed .xlsx file is uploaded directly under Senior Personnel Documents as a Single Copy Document; Research.gov converts it to PDF automatically as part of processing.
- Grants.gov proposals: the completed template is converted to PDF by the proposer and uploaded as a PDF attachment.
Because the COA is a structured spreadsheet rather than a narrative document, formatting errors (merged cells, deleted columns, added rows outside the template’s structure) are a common source of compliance-check rejections. Downloading a fresh copy of the current template directly from nsf.gov’s Senior Personnel Documents page for each new proposal, rather than reusing an older saved copy, is the simplest way to avoid submitting an outdated table structure.
What the Template Actually Asks For
The COA template’s tables capture five categories of relationship, each with its own disclosure window:
- Personal, family, or business relationships that would preclude someone from serving as an impartial reviewer of the proposer’s application — named individuals and the nature of the relationship, no time window attached since these are ongoing.
- Collaborators and co-authors: everyone who is currently, or has been within the 48 months preceding submission, a collaborator or co-author, along with their current organizational affiliation.
- Co-editors: individuals the proposer has served with as co-editor, editor-in-chief, or on an editorial board within the 24 months preceding submission — a shorter window than the collaborator/co-author lookback.
- Graduate advisors and postdoctoral sponsors: the proposer’s own Ph.D. advisor(s) and principal postdoctoral sponsor(s), with their current organizational affiliations.
- Graduate students and postdoctoral associates the proposer has advised or sponsored, with their current (or, if unknown, most recent known) organizational affiliations.
NSF has trimmed the required categories over successive PAPPG revisions — the current guidance explicitly notes that some information requested in earlier PAPPG versions is no longer collected on the COA. Because this list is administratively set (and has changed before), treat the version of the template currently linked from nsf.gov as authoritative rather than a category list carried over from an older proposal file or a prior year’s institutional guidance.
COA vs. Biographical Sketch vs. Synergistic Activities vs. Current and Pending Support
These four documents are all collected under Senior Personnel Documents in Research.gov, all required per senior/key person, and easy to conflate — but each serves a different compliance function and follows different preparation rules:
- Biographical Sketch: professional preparation, appointments, and products (publications/datasets/software), built to the shared NSPM-33 Common Form structure. Mandatory in SciENcv since October 23, 2023.
- Synergistic Activities: up to five examples of broader-impact activities (not a publication list), a separate one-page upload since NSF’s May 20, 2024 format revision moved it out of the Biographical Sketch. See CASRAI’s dedicated guide: NSF Synergistic Activities: Requirements, Format, and How It Changed.
- Current and Pending (Other) Support: every source of research support the individual currently has or has applied for, foreign and domestic, used to check for scientific/budgetary overlap and undisclosed foreign support. Also mandatory in SciENcv since October 23, 2023.
- Collaborators and Other Affiliations (this document): not a support disclosure at all — a reviewer-conflict disclosure, prepared in NSF’s own .xlsx template, not SciENcv, and submitted as a spreadsheet-turned-PDF rather than a SciENcv-generated PDF.
The practical consequence: a research administrator assembling a full Senior Personnel Documents package for one investigator is typically pulling from two different tools — SciENcv for the Biographical Sketch and Current and Pending Support, and NSF’s standalone .xlsx template for COA — plus a separately formatted one-pager for Synergistic Activities. Missing that the COA doesn’t come out of SciENcv is one of the most common last-minute compliance-check catches before submission.
How COA Fits NSF’s Broader Disclosure and Research-Security Framework
The COA sits alongside, but is distinct from, NSF’s other research-security-driven disclosure requirements introduced under NSPM-33, the 2021 National Security Presidential Memorandum directing federal research agencies to standardize disclosure requirements and strengthen research-security practices. Current and Pending Support (foreign and domestic funding disclosure) and the Biographical Sketch’s shift to the NSPM-33 Common Form are both part of that same push toward government-wide disclosure consistency. NSF’s research security policy program — including required research security training and certifications addressing participation in a malign foreign talent recruitment program — runs on a parallel but related track. The COA is narrower in scope than these: it exists specifically to protect the integrity of merit review by keeping conflicted reviewers off a proposal, not to surface foreign funding or affiliations directly (that is what Current and Pending Support is for). But because COA discloses the same population of collaborators, advisors, and co-authors that research-security reviewers may also scrutinize for undisclosed foreign ties, institutions increasingly build COA preparation into the same sponsored-programs workflow as their broader disclosure compliance process rather than treating it as a standalone form.
All of these requirements trace back to NSF’s Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG), which NSF reissues periodically (for example NSF 23-1, NSF 24-1) and which is the authoritative source for the current chapter and effective dates governing Senior Personnel Documents. Because PAPPG chapter numbering and effective dates change between reissues, always confirm current requirements against the PAPPG version in effect for your specific proposal deadline rather than a prior year’s guidance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the COA prepared in SciENcv?
No. The Biographical Sketch and Current and Pending (Other) Support are mandatory SciENcv documents as of October 23, 2023, but the COA is not built in SciENcv at all — it uses NSF’s own fillable .xlsx spreadsheet template, downloaded from nsf.gov and uploaded directly.
How far back do I need to list collaborators and co-authors?
48 months (four years) preceding the proposal’s submission date for collaborators and co-authors. Co-editor relationships use a shorter 24-month window.
Does every co-PI and senior person need a separate COA, or one for the whole team?
Each senior/key person submits their own individual COA disclosing their own collaborators, advisors, and relationships — it is not a single combined document for the proposal team.
Can I edit the layout of the NSF COA template?
No. NSF requires the content and format of the template to remain unaltered; proposers complete the required fields but do not restructure the tables or change the file format from .xlsx (for Research.gov) or the converted PDF (for Grants.gov).
Does the COA disclose foreign funding or foreign affiliations?
Not directly — that disclosure lives in Current and Pending (Other) Support. The COA’s purpose is narrower: identifying people who should be excluded from reviewing the proposal because of a collaboration, advising relationship, editorial relationship, or personal/family/business tie.
