George Mason University
To support extensive outreach in conjunction with continued refinement of the PressForward software platform in order to produce curated overlay publications for scientific communities
This grant provides continued support to George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for the continued development of PressForward, a software platform that facilitates the creation of “overlay journals,” curated collections of scholarly materials whose contents are drawn not from original submissions, but from existing academic sources. PressForward journals have the ability to draw material not only from existing online journals, but from the rich landscape of reputable working paper repositories like SSRN, rapid publication venues like PLoSONE, preprint repositories like arXiv, and the untidy world of blogs, posters, and other gray literature. Previous Sloan grants supported the initial development of PressForward and its deployment to a handful of pilot sites. Funds from this grant support the expansion of the platform, the hiring of an outreach specialist to give presentations and handle online engagement, increased help desk capacity, a summer institute to train potential users, and additional software development as determined through user needs.