Attachment 5 - Requests for Clarification.pdf

# Offeror Question Government Response 1 Can you provide more details on the requirements outlined in Article F.2 (Place of Performance) of the

RFQ and Section 11 (Place of Performance) in Attachment 1 - Performance Work Statement? Are globally dispersed teams eligible to be awarded the contract?

Attachment 1 – PWS, page 11, Section 11 – Place of Performance, has been revised to clarify that contractor personnel may perform work outside CONUS. Applicable cloud/data-location requirements remain unchanged; Attachment 3 – HHSAR IT Clauses, page 23, HHSAR 352.239-77(a)(2) – Data Jurisdiction requires applicable information within the security authorization boundary, data at rest, and data backups to remain within CONUS.

2 FedRAMP Moderate and NIH authorization pathway: Contractor proposes to deploy the JRR application in a cloud environment with an active FedRAMP Moderate authorization and to complete the application-level NIH authorization process after award. We understand the applicable milestones to require an initial security and authorization plan within 30 days, a complete NIH Leveraged Authority to Operate package within 120 days, and support for achievement of the signed NIH Leveraged ATO within 180 days after award.

Please confirm that this pathway is acceptable even if the complete JRR application or service does not itself have an active FedRAMP Moderate authorization available for leverage at the time of quotation.

We also understand that NIH will provide the applicable authorization templates and NIH-specific control tailoring after award. If an application-level authorization is instead required at quotation, please identify that requirement and indicate whether NIH agency sponsorship would be available.

Also, does NIH mandate FedRAMP moderate authorization for code repository?

An active application-level authorization is not required at the time of quotation. The applicable security and authorization requirements, including FedRAMP and NIH A&A requirements, shall be satisfied in accordance with Section H.4 and the applicable HHSAR IT clauses. Where a FedRAMP Moderate authorization is not already available for leverage, the Contractor shall follow the applicable requirements for obtaining or leveraging an authorization within the specified post-award timelines. If repository functionality is provided through a third-party service, the Contractor shall address the service and its integration in its required security documentation and demonstrate compliance with applicable requirements.

3 Period of performance, launch, and phase-out: Contractor understands that the September 28, 2026–September 27, 2027 base period will cover implementation, production launch no later than September 1, 2027, and hosting and operations through September 27, 2027. Contractor further assumes that continued hosting or operations, or any NIH-directed phase-out extending beyond September 27, 2027, would be funded through an extension or separate follow-on action.

Please confirm this interpretation. If the base firm-fixed price must include performance or phase-out activities after September 27, 2027, please clarify how quoters should account for that work given the stated one-year period and absence of options.

The solicitation does not include options or establish a subsequent contract. Any future requirement beyond the current period of performance would be addressed separately by the Government. Quoters should not assume a sole-source continuation or extension of this requirement and should anticipate supporting transition efforts to a succeeding contractor consistent with the PWS: page 9, Section 3.2.7; page 10, Section 6.1; and page 11, Section 8.

4 Division of platform, editorial, and production responsibilities: Contractor understands this procurement to cover the integrated platform, its configuration, hosting, maintenance, technical support, and the ingest, validation, and display of compliant content and metadata supplied to the platform.

Accordingly, contractor proposes that the base quotation exclude performance of initial manuscript scope and technical checks; editorial assignments and decisions; reviewer selection and chasing; author-revision management; copyediting and composition; creation and remediation of JATS XML and publication files; and responses to editorial or policy questions from authors and reviewers. These activities would be performed by a separate editorial or composition provider. Contractor would provide the required workflows and interfaces and would provide technical platform support to users.

Please confirm that this division of responsibilities is consistent with NIH’s intent.

The solicitation requires the Contractor to provide the integrated platform and the platform functionality specified in the PWS. Editorial and production operations that are not expressly identified as Contractor requirements are not within the scope of this requirement. Quoters should clearly identify in their quotes any assumptions concerning the division of platform, editorial, and production responsibilities.

5 Upload, repository, and containerized-compute assumptions: Contractor proposes to meet Task 8 through an interactive containerized environment that allows authors to install permitted open-source software and allows readers to upload data and run the environment, with reader-uploaded data removed after 24 hours. The base scope would not include automated reproducibility verification, automated comparison with published results, or a separate one-click execution service beyond the required interactive functionality.

Contractor further assumes that it may enforce documented malware, security, prohibited-content, licensing, controlled-data, and reasonable technical limits. For firm-fixed-price purposes, contractor proposes to state allowances for:

- Storage per submission and published article;

- File and repository version retention;

- Monthly data transfer;

- Concurrent compute sessions;

- CPU or GPU, memory, and storage resources;

- Session duration; and

- Aggregate monthly compute usage.

Please confirm that quoters may establish reasonable technical and usage assumptions and that material usage above those assumptions would be addressed through an agreed contract modification or other funding mechanism.

The Government is unable to pre-approve a quoter's proposed technical approach during the Q&A period. Quoters may propose reasonable technical and usage controls consistent with the requirements of the solicitation, including controls intended to prevent abuse or misuse of compute resources. Quotes must clearly identify material assumptions and limitations upon which the proposed approach and pricing are based. The Government does not commit through this Q&A response to additional funding or a contract modification for usage exceeding a quoter's proposed assumptions or limits.

RFQ 75N98026Q00992 - Amendment 0001 - Responses to Requests for Clarification

JOURNAL SUBMISSION AND WEB HOSTING – JOURNAL OF REPLICATION AND REPRODUCIBILITY

6 Price structure, invoicing, external services, and optional video: Contractor proposes to provide one base-period firm-fixed price, supported by an implementation and service-delivery milestone invoicing schedule. The optional video-hosting service would be priced separately and excluded from the evaluated base-period total unless NIH elects to include it.

Contractor also assumes that NIH will provide or maintain applicable institutional accounts, memberships, and approvals for services such as Crossref, PubMed or PubMed Central, CLOCKSS or LOCKSS, Altmetric, and Dimensions, and will pay associated deposit, preservation, licensing, and usage fees unless a particular service is expressly included in contractor’s quotation.

Please confirm these pricing assumptions or identify the external accounts, fees, and services that the contractor must include in the base firm-fixed price.

Optional video hosting is not required. Attachment 1 – PWS, page 3, Task 2 – Web Hosting has been revised to remove the optional video-hosting requirement.

Attachment 2 – Quote Instructions and Evaluation Criteria, page 11, Factor 3 – Price remains unchanged; options are not anticipated.

7 Accessibility, responsibility and acceptance: Contractor proposes that Section 508 and WCAG 2.2 Level AA acceptance apply to the contractor-controlled platform interface and contractor-generated rendered outputs. Raw author-supplied downloadable materials, including datasets, code, computational notebooks, archived formats, audio, and video, would be preserved and appropriately identified but would not be included in the platform’s 100 percent remediation measure. Responsibility for remediating such source materials would remain with the author, JRR, or the applicable editorial or production provider.

Please confirm that NIH will assess the platform and rendered content separately from raw author-supplied supplemental materials.

The Contractor is responsible for providing a platform that supports and accurately displays content that conforms to Section 508/WCAG 2.2 Level AA. The Contractor is not responsible for remediating journal articles or other author- or JRR-supplied source content; that responsibility remains with the applicable editorial or production provider. The platform must support the tools and functionality necessary for remediated content to be displayed accurately to users. Attachment 1 – PWS, page 9, Section 5 – Compliance has been revised to clarify this distinction.

8 SLA and AQL measurement: For consistent pricing and acceptance, contractor proposes the following measurement definitions:

- Uptime will be measured through an agreed monitoring method and will exclude scheduled maintenance, Government-directed outages, failures of Government-controlled or unrelated third-party services, and events outside the contractor’s reasonable control.

- Monthly change accuracy will be measured against authorized changes implemented by the contractor, with those changes serving as the denominator. Errors already present in source content or instructions will be excluded.

- Successful email delivery will mean acceptance by the recipient’s mail server rather than inbox placement.

- Webpage performance will be measured using an agreed representative page set, test locations, user profiles, cache conditions, and testing frequency.

Please confirm these definitions or provide the alternative definitions NIH will use for contract surveillance and acceptance.

The Government is unable to pre-approve a quoter's proposed technical approach during the Q&A period. The performance standards, AQLs, and monitoring methods identified in Attachment 1A apply to the requirement. Quoters may identify assumptions and describe their proposed methods for demonstrating compliance in their quotes; however, a quoter's proposed definitions will not supersede or modify the solicitation's stated performance standards, AQLs, or monitoring requirements.

9 Search-page and article-level recommendations: Contractor interprets the requested “See Also” or “Amazon experience” functionality as dynamically generated related-content recommendations based on the user’s query, article metadata, JATS relationships, and semantic or content similarity within the JRR corpus. The base approach would not depend on identifiable user-level behavioral tracking or search and recommendation results drawn from PubMed or other external collections unless separately scoped.

Please confirm that this interpretation meets the requirement for recommendations on search-results and individual article pages.

The Government is unable to pre-approve a quoter's proposed technical approach during the Q&A period. The solicitation requires relevant “See Also” links on both the search page and individual article pages. Quoters shall propose an approach for satisfying this requirement and clearly identify any assumptions upon which the approach is based. Proposed approaches will be evaluated in accordance with the solicitation's evaluation criteria.

10 MeSH and taxonomy responsibilities: Contractor proposes that the platform support the capture, import, display, search, and filtering of MeSH terms and other agreed taxonomies. Assignment of MeSH terms and human taxonomy curation would be performed by JRR staff or its editorial provider. Automated taxonomy suggestions, human indexing services, and additional taxonomy development would not be included unless separately requested.

Please confirm this division of responsibility.

The Government is unable to pre-approve a quoter's proposed technical approach during the Q&A period. The PWS requires the platform to support taxonomies, with MeSH identified as the preferred taxonomy. Quoters shall propose an approach for satisfying this requirement and clearly identify any assumptions concerning taxonomy assignment, curation, and related responsibilities. Proposed approaches and assumptions will be evaluated in accordance with the solicitation's evaluation criteria.

11 Analytics and visitor privacy: Contractor interprets the reference to Universal Analytics as a functional analytics requirement rather than a requirement to use the discontinued Universal Analytics product.

Contractor proposes Google Analytics 4 or an equivalent NIH-approved, privacy-preserving analytics service configured to provide aggregate reporting without collecting personally identifiable information from general site visitors. Applicable cookie, consent, IP-address, retention, and data-residency controls would be documented in the security and privacy plans.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or an equivalent analytics solution should be used to meet this requirement. Contractors should recommend currently supported solutions.

Attachment 1 – PWS, page 8, Task 17 – Usage Statistics has been revised accordingly.

12 Please confirm the content management system (CMS) expected for this project. Is WordPress or another CMS mandated, or can vendors propose alternative platforms?

The Government does not mandate a specific content management system. Quoters shall propose the platform and supporting technologies they consider appropriate to meet the requirements of the solicitation.

13 Could you confirm the budget range or allocation the NIH has set aside for this project, including hosting, submission system, and optional features such as video hosting?

The Government will not provide budget information. Quoters shall develop their firm-fixed prices based on the requirements of the RFQ and PWS. Any optional or value-added capabilities proposed by a quoter should be clearly identified separately from the required scope and pricing.

14 The RFQ notes a performance period from September 28, 2026 to September 27, 2027, with a final launch deadline of September 1, 2027. Could you confirm if this timeline is fixed, or if phased delivery milestones are acceptable?

September 1, 2027 is the required no-later-than date for the fully developed, deployed, and publicly available production platform. Quoters may describe a phased implementation approach in their quotes, provided that all required functionality is fully operational by the required production launch date. Proposed implementation approaches will be evaluated as part of the technical evaluation.

15 Please clarify the expected article volume beyond year one. The PWS mentions 20–40 articles in the first year; should vendors plan for similar or increased volume in subsequent years?

We roughly estimate a 10-15% increase in volume per year after the first year. This estimate is subject to change.

16 Regarding optional video hosting, should this be included as a mandator feature in the base proposal, or treated as an add‑on line item?

See Government response to Question 6

17 For system integrations, can you confirm whether integrations with repositories (e.g., PubMed, Crossref, ORCID) must be fully functional at launch, or if phased implementation is acceptable?

The integrations identified as requirements in the PWS, including PubMed, Crossref, and ORCID, must be fully functional/operational by the required production launch date of September 1, 2027, unless the solicitation expressly establishes a different milestone. Quoters may describe their implementation sequencing, but all required functionality must be available by the applicable launch date.

18 We noticed that Section J lists Attachment 2 – Quote Instructions and Evaluation Criteria as part of the incorporated documents, but it appears to have been removed from the posting on August 11. Could you confirm Whether Attachment 2 was superseded by an amendment, and if so, when we can expect to receive it?; Whether the evaluation criteria or quote submission instructions have changed as a result;

Whether the current due date of August 27, 2026, 2:00 PM ET still stands

Notice ID 75N98026Q00992 was revised on 8/11 to add supplemental information to Attachment 2 - Quote Instructions and Evaluation Criteria. The notice has remained active and includes all relevant attachments. Please make sure to select the “Current Record” version in SAM.gov, when viewing this notice.

19 Is there any incumbent/recompete or this is a brand-new project? If yes, could you please provide us with their award number or even if the customer bought similar services in the past.

This is a new requirement; there is no incumbent.