The National Institutes of Health is the largest single source of money for academic research, so faculty members and administrators have been closely following the agency’s plans to overhaul its peer-review process for grant proposals.

Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the NIH, described some of the expected changes this past summer, but this week the agency unveiled the timeline for the first set of alterations, which can more accurately be called tweaks, not major shifts.

One of the clearest changes will be to cut the maximum length of applications for the major investigator-led grants, known as R01’s, from 25 pages to 12 pages. The agency says that change will ease the burden on scientists who serve on peer-review panels. But the new limit will not kick in until January 2010.

The agency announced it would also seek to help reviewers by making the process of assessing proposals more flexible, although few details were given out this week. One option might be to use online “virtual” review sessions, rather than requiring most reviewers to attend the sessions in person. The NIH will test that option next year. —Richard Monastersky