NIH Just Forecast the One R3PEATS Door a Solo PI Can Walk Through: RFA-RM-28-011, $5.6 Million, 16 Awards

The NIH Common Fund quietly posted a grants.gov forecast on September 11, 2026 for RFA-RM-28-011, and academic PIs should read it closely: $5.6 million across 16 awards, applications estimated due October 1, 2027, and it is the only door into the new R3PEATS program a single investigator can walk through alone.

That last part is the story. R3PEATS — Rigor, Replicability, & Reproducibility to Promote Excellence, Accuracy, & Translation in Science — was cleared as a $161.71 million, five-year Common Fund program built around four large consortium-scale Initiatives. What actually landed on grants.gov last week was a three-RFA stack, and only one of the three is sized for a normal lab.

The forecast that opened the individual-investigator door

The posting is grants.gov opportunity 363849, listed as RFA-RM-28-011, "R3PEATS Grassroots Rigor Projects: Individual Metascience and Individual Laboratory Capacity-Building (RP1)." It is a forecast, not an open solicitation — NIH is telling you what is coming, not taking applications yet.

The numbers NIH published:

Eligibility, as forecast, is unusually wide for a Common Fund mechanism: public and private institutions of higher education, 501(c)(3) and non-501(c)(3) nonprofits, small businesses, for-profits other than small businesses, tribal governments and organizations, state and local governments — and non-domestic (non-U.S.) entities, including foreign institutions. Common Fund RFAs frequently bar foreign institutions outright. This one, on the forecast, does not.

Two project types that are not the same proposal

NIH's forecast description splits RP1 into two lanes, and conflating them is the easiest way to write a losing application:

Metascience projects "develop and evaluate tools, metrics, guidelines, or infrastructure to promote high-quality research practices." This is research about research. The deliverable is an instrument other labs can use — a validated metric, a reporting standard, a piece of infrastructure — plus evidence that it works.

Laboratory Capacity-Building projects "support labs in adopting new rigor- and replicability-related techniques or processes while tracking and sharing factors that influence research outcomes." This is not metascience. It is your lab actually adopting preregistration, blinding, randomization, or protocol standardization — and instrumenting the adoption so the sector learns what happened.

The second lane is the one most bench PIs will misread. It is not a supplement to run your existing science more carefully. The tracked-and-shared part is the deliverable. If your specific aims describe biology and mention rigor practices as method, you have written an R01 and mailed it to the wrong program.

The arithmetic across the three-RFA stack

The forecast posted alongside two siblings on the same day, with identical estimated dates:

Total: $14.85 million across 25 awards. The R3PEATS concept budget projects $35.47 million for FY28, so this stack is roughly 42% of the program's second-year spend — the rest goes to Replication Centers, Metascience Testbeds, the Education and Outreach Center, and the Coordination and Review Center, which are consortium awards.

RP1 is the outlier in shape. It carries the second-largest pot but more than three times the award count of the other two combined. Sixteen awards at roughly $350,000 total costs is pilot money, and it is deliberately pilot money. The RM1 requires coordinated multi-team designs. The K12 requires institutional commitment for early-career cohorts. RP1 requires one PI with a defensible plan.

There is a structural wrinkle worth flagging. The cleared concept described small grassroots-style awards — "Innovation Awards" and "Rigor Scholar Awards" — as things the Coordination and Review Center would administer, with merit review by an externally appointed R3PEATS Steering Committee, staggered across program years. What posted on grants.gov is a direct NIH RFA with its own opportunity number, its own funding line, and its own application date. Whether the final RFA still routes some portion of review through the Steering Committee is not yet stated. If it does, that is a materially different reviewer profile than a standard study section, and it is the first thing to ask R3PEATS@mail.nih.gov about.

The activity code deserves a second look

RP1 is NIH's Science-Driven Research Project code, not a legacy R-series mechanism, and it behaves differently. Per NIH's activity-code documentation, an RP1 NOFO defines application options — exploratory, standard, and extended — each with its own project period, budget cap, and research strategy page limit, and applications with project periods of up to three years are automatically identified as exploratory.

At ~$350,000 average across 16 awards, RP1 grassroots projects will almost certainly fall in the exploratory band. That has a consequence PIs should price in now: NIH states that PD/PIs do not retain Early-Stage Investigator status upon receiving an RP1 award, regardless of whether the application was standard or exploratory.

Read that twice if you are an ESI. A $350,000 rigor pilot that extinguishes ESI status is a genuinely different proposition from the same dollars under an R03 or R21. For an early-career PI with an R01 resubmission in flight, the sequencing matters more than the science does. For a mid-career PI, it is a non-issue. This is the single most consequential detail in the posting and it is nowhere in the forecast text — it lives in the activity-code definition.

What the cleared concept tells you reviewers will want

The revised R3PEATS concept, presented to the NIH Council of Councils in May 2026 by NEI Director Michael Chiang after an initial January 2026 review, is unusually explicit about what the program is trying to fix, and it defines its terms against NIH's Leading in Gold Standard Science report and the OSTP Memo on Implementing Gold Standard Science:

• Rigor: "the strict application of the scientific method to ensure robust, unbiased, and transparent experimental design, methodology, analysis, interpretation and reporting of results."
• Replicability: "the ability to perform the same experiment or study using the same methods and conditions to achieve the same result" — direct replication.
• Reproducibility: "the ability of independent researchers to test a hypothesis through multiple methods and consistently achieve results that confirm or refute it" — conceptual replication.

Both direct and conceptual replication are in scope. The concept also states plainly why the Council pushed for a grassroots component at all: members wanted "broader participation by individual laboratories" and worried "that only a small group of studies would be selected for replication." RP1 exists because reviewers said the program was too top-heavy.

The concept's named deliverables are the rubric in disguise: a knowledgebase of "experimental and biological contributors to variability, heterogeneity, and replicability," "novel validated metrics for assessing and stimulating replication activities," and "a cadre of researchers newly participating in and promoting highly rigorous and replicable research." A proposal that produces a shareable artifact and a documented lessons-learned contribution maps onto all three. A proposal that produces a paper maps onto none.

This is the same policy current running through OSTP's Golden Age memo and its $200 billion research redirect — portability, speed, and verifiability as funding criteria rather than rhetoric. R3PEATS is what that looks like when it reaches the bench.

Twelve and a half months is the real asset here

The gap between this forecast and the estimated October 1, 2027 due date is roughly 12.5 months, with the full RFA estimated for July 1, 2027. Forecast dates slip — treat every one of them as provisional and re-check before you plan around them. But the lead time is the point of a forecast, and it is long enough to do the two things that actually separate funded rigor proposals from unfunded ones.

First, generate preliminary data on the practice, not the biology. If you are proposing a lab capacity-building project, start tracking the process metrics now — protocol deviation rates, inter-operator variability, time-to-replication on an internal finding. By July 2027 you will have a year of baseline that no competing applicant wrote from memory.

Second, resolve the ESI question with your program officer before you invest in writing. Email R3PEATS@mail.nih.gov, ask whether the final RFA will offer standard as well as exploratory options, and ask how Steering Committee involvement in review is expected to work. Forecast-stage program contacts answer these questions. Post-RFA contacts are buried.

Sixteen awards is not many. But 16 awards at roughly $350,000, no cost sharing, open to foreign institutions and for-profits, with a year of warning, is the most accessible entry point into a $161.71 million Common Fund program that will otherwise be carved up by consortia.

Next step: Search active NIH rigor, replicability, and reproducibility opportunities on Granted and set an alert so you see RFA-RM-28-011 the day the full solicitation replaces the forecast.