The narrative you intend to submit, in whatever state it is in. A complete draft gives the sharpest review, but the panel reads an incomplete one honestly and tells you which sections it could not assess.
PREPARING YOUR PACKAGE
Two documents. Ten minutes of preparation, at most.
The panel needs less than you think, but what it gets shapes what it can tell you. This page covers the required uploads, the optional ones that measurably sharpen the review, the formats that parse cleanly, and when in your drafting cycle a run is worth spending.
REQUIRED
What a run cannot start without.
The programme announcement, FOA, RFA, BAA, or call you are answering. This is what the panel judges you against — without it, the review has no rulebook and no criteria.
OPTIONAL, BUT IT SHOWS
Four uploads that change what the panel can say.
None are required. Each closes a specific blind spot, named beside it.
Prior reviewer comments
Turns a general review into a resubmission auditThe summary statement or panel summary from a previous submission of this work. The panel reads it and checks, weakness by weakness, whether you have actually answered it.
Your budget and justification
Catches scope-to-budget mismatchesThe panel checks whether the money matches the science: effort that supports the aims, equipment the methods actually require, and years that line up with the timeline.
Biosketches for key personnel
Enables the Investigator criterionReviewers assess whether the team can do what the proposal promises. Without biosketches the panel can only judge the claim, not the evidence behind it.
Letters of support or collaboration
Closes the most common structural weaknessWhere an aim depends on a partner site, a dataset, or a facility, a letter is the difference between an assertion and an arrangement.
FORMATS
What parses cleanly, and what does not.
FormatSupportNotes
PDF with selectable textBestPreserves structure, figures, and reference formatting. This is what agencies want anyway.
Scanned or image-only PDFDegradedText is pulled from the PDF's own text layer. A scan has none, so the panel sees little or nothing. Export a text PDF instead.
DOCX, LaTeX source, ZIP archivesNot acceptedExport to PDF first. The panel judges the document a reviewer sees, not the source that produced it.
Password-protected filesNot acceptedRemove protection before uploading. Files are encrypted at rest regardless, and deleted after the run.
The proposal and solicitation can be up to 15 MB each. As many as ten supporting documents can go alongside them, up to 5 MB each, and the whole run can be up to 20 MB and 150 pages, which is what the review models can read at once. If a document will not parse, the run stops before it starts and nothing is charged against your proposal.
LEAVE IT OUT
Four things not to upload.
Describe your clinical study in the narrative. Do not upload the patient records, identifiable datasets, or anything covered by a HIPAA obligation — we do not sign BAAs.
No ITAR, EAR-controlled, or CUI content. If your programme office has flagged the work, GrantPanel is not the right environment for it.
Including one you are reviewing for an agency. Confidential peer-review material is not yours to process, and our acceptable-use policy prohibits it.
They dilute the reviewers' attention across text no panelist would read. Cite them instead — the reference audit handles the rest.
TIMING
Run it early enough to act on it.
One proposal includes three runs. The pattern that gets the most out of them is a first run at complete-draft stage, a revision run after you fix the structural findings, and the last held in reserve for the week before submission.
A run four days out still catches compliance triggers, but a structural weakness found four days out is a weakness you submit with.
Before you start a run
Narrative is a complete draft, or you know which sections are missing
The solicitation is the current version for your deadline
Figures and their captions are in the document, not attached separately
References are included — the reference audit needs them
Every file is a PDF with selectable text, and none is password-protected
No human-subject data, CUI, or export-controlled content is in the package