Privacy Act; Implementation

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS or Department), through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), proposes to exempt, from certain requirements of the Privacy Act, a subset of records in a new system of records, System No. 09-25-0225, NIH Electronic Research Administration (eRA) Records (NIH eRA Records), which covers records used in managing NIH research and development applications and awards throughout the award lifecycle. Elsewhere in today's Federal Register, HHS has published a proposed System of Records Notice (SORN) for System No. 09-25-0225 for public notice and comment. The subset of records proposed to be exempted is material that would inappropriately reveal the identities of referees who provide letters of recommendation and peer reviewers who provide written evaluative input and recommendations to NIH about particular funding applications under an express promise by the government that their identities in association with the written work products they authored and provided to the government will be kept confidential. Only material that would inappropriately reveal a particular referee or peer reviewer as the author of a specific work product (e.g., reference or recommendation letters, reviewer critiques, preliminary or final individual overall impact/priority scores, and/or assignment of peer reviewers to an application and other evaluative materials and data compiled by NIH/OER) is proposed to be exempted. The exemptions would protect not only an author's name in association with their written work product but any content that could enable the author to be identified from context. The Privacy Act provisions from which the material is proposed to be exempted are those that require the agency to provide an accounting of disclosures, access and amendment, and notification, which are contained in subsections (c)(3) and (d) of the Privacy Act.