Many institutions have taken advantage of long-standing PD functionality that allows for S2S NIH proposals to be submitted to route with the Research Plan tab in draft mode. Once submitted to route, the proposal enters a status rendering it view-only due to submission lockdown rules, with the caveat that the draft version documents uploaded on the Research Plan tab can be replaced with final versions of those documents. Once they are replaced and the tab is switched to final, it becomes completely view-only.
This approach is useful because it allows the budget and other administrative components of the proposal to start through the review path while allowing for the science of the Research Plan to be finalized at a later time prior to submission to NIH. The draft vs. final option also exists on the Project Plan tab, which is the conceptual parallel to the NIH Research Plan tab used for custom templates. However, there is no comparable option for non-NIH S2S submissions (or for some of the more recently transitioned NIH fellowship and career development mechanisms).
Pre-review routing provides an alternative approach to achieving this and offers advantages. Proposals can be submitted to pre-review route when the relevant information for that pre-review process is complete – all tabs in the PD interface do not need to be checked complete. No need to upload incomplete or blank documents to be able to complete the tab to submit to route in draft form. PD Lite can be configured to hide the draft vs. final option as well. The pre-review route can include steps that are not critical to the time-sensitive final route so it can have as few steps as possible.
Using pre-review routes in lieu of draft vs. final on final routes provides similar capabilities with the advantage that it can be used for any proposal – any sponsor, S2S or custom template. It also avoids the need for users to upload blank or partially completed documents on tabs where final versions are not yet available in order to complete the tab so that the option to submit to final route becomes available. And, final routes that generally immediately precede submission of S2S proposals can be reduced in complexity to the minimum requirements based on institutional policy.