The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has changed some of its grant-submission requirements, effective from 14 January. The project-summary section of the submission now asks applicants to use separate text boxes for their proposal overview, their description of the project's intellectual merit and their explanation of its broader impacts. Submitting these sections as one document will cause the application to be rejected. NSF spokeswoman Maria Zacharias says that reviewers were spending too long teasing out the merits and impacts of proposals. Applicants may also now list research products such as patents, data sets or software in addition to publications — a boon for junior investigators, says Zacharias. The changes stem from a review by the NSF's oversight board, and a federal directive that the agency recognize the broader impact of research it supports.