Reporting to NSF

How to complete JRN annual (and other) reports for NSF
Published

March 7, 2026

🚧 This is under construction. 🚧

Reporting about JRN activities for our funders, particularly NSF, is satisfying, fun, and mandatory. NSF requires annual reports at the end of each year of a funded project, and a final outcomes report about one year after any funded project ends (I think). A mid-term review is also required for LTER sites that are on a 6-year funding cycle (though this may be changing). For the IM team these reporting events mean assembling information about people in the program, research outputs like papers and datasets, and any notable activities or milestones in the project. It is quite a bit of work, but, truthfully, reporting requirements do provide valuable opportunities and motivation to assess progress on the proposal, catalog research products, and keep program information up-to-date.

Annual reports

Preparing the annual report happens in a few phases, starting with collecting information from, and about, the Jornada research community. For the current reporting period, all research products must be catalogued, participants and their activites must be documented, and a narrative about the progress towards the work proposed in the NSF award needs to be written. All these things get assembled as a report in NSF’s Research.gov platform and then submitted for review by the relevent Program Officer.

Before starting the process below, create new folder in the JRN Proposals and Reports Google Drive folder for this year’s annual report. Lots of things will need to be collected there.

1. Survey the community

Though the IM team keeps track of things like publications, people, and datasets throughout the year, it is easy to miss things and surveying the JRN community is necessary to fill in any gaps. We use a combination of survey forms, spreadsheets, and an annual report template to collect this information. These are sent out to the Science Team via an email announcement and we provide a deadline to respond.

Notes

  • The current survey form and responses are in Google Drive. We update these a little each year.
  • There are some spreadsheets in preparation.
  • Some information (like outreach activities) gets entered directly into the project narrative template (see below)

2. Collect publications

Throughout the year, reference information for new JRN publications are added the LTER-JRN Zotero library. As annual reports approach, any missing publications gathered through survey activities are added to the library. We focus on journal articles, but we are beginning to track conference presentations too. As we assemble the library, PDF copies of journal articles and dissertations/theses should be downloaded and placed in the appropriate annual report Google Drive folder.

Notes

  • The LTER-JRN Zotero library. There is some documentation on using elsewhere in this documentation that I’ll link to soon…
  • We need to come up with a way to collect journal articles…

3. Update dataset lists & statistics

New and updated datasets are an important research product that NSF expects to see listed in annual reports. Essentially this translates into a list of new DOIs minted for data. We also calculate some statistics to go in the narrative of the report (new datasets, uploaded datasets, usage metrics).

Notes

  • Greg has written a collection of sripts and notebooks (https://github.com/jornada-im/reporting) to collect and report data publishing and re-use statistics, mainly from the EDI repository. This outputs from this (figuress, tables) are in the jornada_im/reporting_io directory on the team’s shared drive.
  • It can be very onerous to upload all datasets into PAR (there can be several hundred per year). At times we resort to creating a PDF list of dataset references and uploading that as an ancillary document.

4. Update the participants list

Participants for the award are managed in a Research.gov database. To update this database for an annual report, an Excel spreadsheet must be downloaded from Research.gov, updated with that year’s information, and then uploaded back to Research.gov. Use information gathered from survey activities to update the participants worksheet. It is important to preserve the formatting of the Excel sheet during this process

Notes:

  • The participants spreadsheetdownloaded from NSF is cumulative for the award. In the first year of the award it will be empty, and all participants need to be added. In subsequent years of the award only new participants and updates to the effort/support of current ones need to be provided.
  • The participants list should not include the lead of cover page PIs for the LTER award.

5. Upload products to PAR

Publications and datasets, and other research products, can uploaded to NSF’s Public Access Repository (PAR). After logging in to Research.gov, access PAR from the research products area. If the product has a DOI, PAR can populate most of the citation metadata about the product. Connect each product to the appropriate NSF Grant ID. You will need to convert any article files or other PDFs to PDF/A (archival PDF) format before uploading them to PAR.

Notes

  • Dissertations/theses uploaded to PAR are NOT automatically added to the annual report for an award (as of 2026). Even if the document has been associated with the NSF award ID during upload to PAR. For now, upload a BibTex list of dissertations/theses under the Products tab in the report.
  • There are a variety of ways to convert to PDF/A format. Free, online converters seem to work, as does opening in MacOS Preview and then exporting to PDF/A format.

6. Draft the report narrative

This is usually done in a shared document in Google Drive. Important activities and milestones like community events, outreach activities, trainings, and graduations need to be described. Investigators need to be reminded to contribute to their assigned sections. We may come up with a better way to delegate parts of this.

Notes

  • There are important sections for Information Management and Broadening Participation activities that need to be filled in.
  • Figures are typically added to a separate document in Google Drive and we aim for at least 5 per report.

7. Assemble and submit the report

Final assembly of the report entails

  1. Copying/pasting content from the draft narrative into the appropriate boxes of the annual report in Research.gov.
  2. Verifying that research products (journal articles, conferences, datasets, dissertations/theses) entered into PAR, or as BibTex uploads, are found under the Products tab of the report.
  3. Attaching a PDF file with figures for the report (if available).
  4. Attaching ancillary documents. Sometimes we add a PDF list of new/updated datasets.

Notes

  • …

Final outcomes reports

Midterm reviews

We’ll fill this in if we ever have a midterm review again…