Though the Sloan Foundation has funded several initiatives to make the citation of data a regular, established practice in science, data citation is itself unidirectional.  In a properly cited scientific article, the reader will know what datasets are being referenced and used, but the creator or curator of those cited datasets may have no way to know his or her data is being cited.  Yet knowing how a dataset is being used and by whom can be a crucial factor in making decisions about its value, how to extend it, and how to increase its usefulness.   This grant supports work by Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for research data management at Johns Hopkins University, to develop a third-party service called “Matchmaker” that would independently map the relationships between articles and data, linking between existing publishing platforms and data repositories.  These relationships could be created by a number of different stakeholders in the scholarly communication process:  by a publisher, by a data archive, by an individual researcher, or even by a library.  When fully developed, these relationships would then form a "graph" that could be queried without having to repeatedly poll every repository and publisher, a complement to more traditional citation services like ISI or Google Scholar.

In 2013, a White House Office of Science & Technology Policy directive outlined new open-access expectations for research products funded by the federal government.  One question left open by the directive, however, is how exactly those materials should be managed and made discoverable, particularly for the long term.  Funds from this grant support a project by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to facilitate compliance with the OSTP directive by developing a platform for reporting and notifying parties of events related to the release of publicly and privately funded research.  Partnering with the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the ARL will create a multi-institutional platform, the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), that will tie together existing university-based institutional repositories into a coherent discovery and compliance tracking system.  When completed, SHARE will function as connective tissue that will enable others to build user-facing services that build on the multi-institutional architecture, leveraging university investments in their own institutional repositories and providing a valuable resource to help university offices of sponsored research meet their reporting and compliance-tracking obligations.

The rise of the Internet and digitally enabled means of disseminating scholarly research has led to a burgeoning interest in “altmetrics,” alternative measures of the impact and importance of scholarship that extend beyond traditional measures like citation counts. Funds from this grant support efforts by Vincent Lariviere and Stefanie Haustein of the University of Montreal and their colleague Cassidy Sugimoto of Indiana propose to dig deeper into the relative value and meaning of two specific altmetric indicators:  social media tweets and “saves” by popular bibliographic reference manager platforms.  The researcher team will match bibliographic and citation data from the Web of Science (linked with the same articles as they appear in PubMed and arXiv) with these forms of altmetric activity in order to answer a set of questions about the relationship between altmetric signals and the ultimate impact of a given work as traditionally measured in citation.  Particular focus will be given to the relationship, if any, between initial attention paid to preprints or working papers and the subsequent citation of formally published versions of those same papers.

This grant provide 14 months of support for the Hypothes.is Project, a web annotation platform that aims to bring granular annotation of online scholarly materials to users through the development of an easy-to-use interface that makes web annotation fully collaborative, shareable, and searchable.  Grant funds will support continued development of the Hypothes.is platform as well as three pilot implementations, one at the American Geophysical Union, one at the arXiv preprint repository, and one at eLife, an influential online journal sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  Additional funds support a 2014 summit for Hypothes.is stakeholders to ensure compliance with current and forthcoming standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

The Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund (SRF), begun in 2002, provides persecuted scholars from around the world with one- to two-year fellowships that allow threatened scholars to pursue their academic and scientific studies in the safety of one of the Fund’s partner institutions.  This grant provides three years of continued support to the Scholar Rescue Fund for these activities.  Grant funds will provide life-saving fellowships for an estimated eight to ten persecuted scholars per year and help defray administrative costs associated with identifying, rescuing, and finding appropriate host institutions for endangered scholars world-wide.

Funds from this grant support a series of projects to increase the usefulness of the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, the oldest and largest bibliography in its field and an invaluable resource to historians of science worldwide.  Using grant funds, Isis Bibliographer Stephen Weldon and his team will spearhead a series of initiatives designed to bring the ISIS Bibliography more fully into the digital era, including retrospective digitization, data extraction, and cleanup of the existing bibliography; the development of new researcher-facing tools and interfaces; “community-sourced” mechanisms for maintaining the bibliography going forward; and a mini-grant program to incentivize novel or innovative ways of utilizing the bibliography as a scholarly resource.

Researchers working in indoor microbial ecology have no easy way to share data.  Though the community is adopting state-of-the-art gene sequencing techniques, use of these new methods makes it difficult to compare newly collected data with older data collected using alternative methods.  What’s needed is an easy-to-use data platform that will facilitate data sharing by integrating sample handling, sequencing, analysis, and data release.  Funds from this grant support a project by Rob Knight of the University of Colorado and Mitch Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory to develop just such an integrated data platform. Over the next two years, Knight and Sogin will attempt to merge two data platforms used by microbial ecologists: QIIME (Quantitative Insights into Molecular Ecology) and VAMPS (Visualization and Analysis of Microbial Population Structures).  VAMPS is very user-friendly and nimble; QIIME is more powerful but harder to use.  The aim is to develop a new system that combines the best of both platforms, tying the user-friendly tools in VAMPS to the powerful analytical capacity of QIIME.  They will also develop a series of protocols and standards for the collection and analysis of microbial data using the new system.  The project will result in new standard operating procedures, better software tools, and improved methods for depositing and sharing data in indoor microbial ecology. The team expects the new tools and procedures to be adopted by at least 75 to 100 researchers, with at least 100 students and postdocs will be trained through annual workshops.

This grant provides continuing support to Columbia University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, for twenty-eight months of activities designed to encourage top film students to develop screenplays and produce short films about science and technology. Activities supported through this grant include the provision of faculty mentors and science advisors for students working on science-themed film projects, two annual awards for production of short films on science and technology, one annual award to develop promising feature film scripts with science content, an annual science information seminar for film students,  and networking events with select film industry producers, agents, and managers.

This grant provides continued support for the second year of the Age Smart Employer Awards, which honor local New York City employers who have demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to leveraging older workers’ talent while meeting the goals of both the business and its employees.   Grant funds will support the administration of the awards, the selection process, and outreach activities.  Particular emphasis will be placed on expanding the circle of businesses that know about and apply for the awards as well as increasing the visibility for winning employers and the innovative practices for which they are being honored.  Outreach strategy will particularly target small businesses (those employing fewer than 100 workers) and employers in New York City’s growing health care sector.

This grant provides renewed support to the Berkeley Indoor Microbial Ecology Consortium (BIMERC), a multidisciplinary group of mycologists, microbiologists, chemists, architects, and engineers who are working together to better understand the sources, factors, and processes involved in the assembly of microbial communities indoors. Grant funds support a number of planned scientific studies by the BIMERC team, including an investigation into which microbial volatile organic compounds are indicators of microbial population growth;, a study of how environment, building characteristics, and human behavior affect airborn microbes; a project to measure and model living particles using a laser-based ultraviolet spectrometer; and an analysis of microbial reproduction using gene transcripts. Additional funds support the purchase of a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer, a Proton Transfer Reaction-Time of Flight-Mass Spectrometer (PTR-ToF-MS), which will permit the team to conduct real-time chemical analysis.  The team will share their findings through peer-reviewed scientific publications, presentations at meetings and workshops, and through web-based blogs.