The past 5 years have seen an explosion of new and re-designed external-to-CSU portals used for many different combinations of proposal development, proposal submission, award management, invoicing, financial reporting, and closeout actions.

One of the primary activities of the OSP eRA team is to help manage access when a portal has a central administration (organization-level) role or process for access management. The eRA team also tries to maintain working knowledge of the wide variety of portals our community is dealing with, even if there isn’t a central admin function for a portal. For new or less-often-used portals, we rely on the community of CSU research administrators to help us figure out how to proceed with access and use cases.

As part of our management + awareness strategy, we have a ‘Portal Guidance’ document for the most commonly used portals. This guidance is designed to help department research administrators and sponsored project key personnel (aka PI, PD/PI, co-PI, co-investigators) with the account request process. The document also includes tips about account management and reminders of how OSP interacts with the portals.

Please note: Any external portal proposal submission process must be reconciled with CSU’s required internal KR PD review and routing processes.

A new version of this Portal Guidance has just been posted with updated tips about Login.gov, the secure sign-in portal that many federal agencies are using to satisfy two-factor authentication and other account security requirements, and the transition to using the SAM UEI instead of DUNS for account affiliation requests in federal portals.

Find portal guidance on the  OSP website Proposal & Budget Development lifecycle page. Look for “Portal Account Guidance” in the right navigation column.