NIH RePORT

I was looking over some of the projects at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that are receiving funding from the so-called American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Pub.L. 111-5). Some of them, like Ronald T Wakai's seem to be laudable projects. You can review all of them yourself with the NIH's new and currently pretty good on-line database called the Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT). The actual search tool can be accessed here.

RePORT isn't without some weaknesses though. For one thing, you can't link to a particular page, or at least I can't figure out a way to do so. With the old CRISP system, this was a straightforward matter. See for instance one of Wakai's old abstracts. Unfortunately, the CRISP is scheduled to be killed and will be replaced with RePORT.

I used to have to work back and forth between three NIH databases to put this information together; NIH has finally consolidated it here. So far, it seems like a valuable resource, but it would be better if the pages could be linked to and if the entire funding histories were included.