A "data scientist" is someone who combines mathematical and statistical sophistication, the computational skills necessary to perform hands?on analysis of data at large scale, and the communication abilities to convey results meaningfully through visualizations and narrative. This combination of skills is still quite rare and highly in demand: an oft?cited McKinsey report published in 2011 estimates that the United States will need an additional 140,000 to 190,000 data scientists by 2018. Nonprofit organizations lag industry in the use of data scientists. Even when an organization sees how data science could improve their understanding of their clients or improve the efficacy of their work, they often lack the internal expertise and resources to take action. DataKind is a new organization founded to bridge exactly this gap. Inspired by the Teach for America model, Datakind aims to connect mission?driven organizations with designers, programmers, and statisticians from the burgeoning data science community who are looking for personally fulfilling opportunities to volunteer their time and expertise. Funds from this grant will provide two-years of pilot support to DataKind to provide a consistent revenue stream while it builds a client base of organizations and volunteers, develops a sustainable business model, and cultivates long-term funding sources.

This grant provides two years of core operating support to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), headquartered at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Funds will support the continued operation and activities of the DCO's governing secretariat and international steering committee, which is responsible for coordinating and synthesizing the individual initiatives pursued by the DCO's four scientific directorates. Though this grant, the Secretariat will pursue a diverse array of important goals, including further development of the organizational infrastructure of the DCO, strengthening the network of collaborating DCO institutions, overseeing the production of a "baseline report" that quantifies the current state of knowledge of deep earth carbon, managing a "launch" of the project aimed at major media and the public, securing matching gifts and other sources of funding for DCO activities, and developing a detailed vision for the final six years of the project.

In a conventional journal, the mechanisms for feedback on published articles are limited to a letter to the editor or direct correspondence with the author. As an increasing quantity and diversity of scholarly products are disseminated on the web, one could imagine much more efficient and constructively visible commenting mechanisms. Initial experiments in so-called "post-publication review," however, have fallen flat. Comment boxes on online articles and other research materials overwhelmingly lie empty. Perhaps comment boxes are the wrong tool. Rather than asking a reader to comment on a full article, a much more granular approach might fare better, allowing readers to comment on a particular point, equation, or assumption in a published work. Funds from this grant support the development of hypothes.is, a particularly promising effort to build precisely such a granular web annotation system. This one-year grant to Planetwork NGO will support the design, testing, and launch of hypothes.is, bringing an innovative new pilot platform to fruition that has the potential to reshape how researchers communicate and interact with one another and with online scholarly resources.

In March of 2012, Christophe Pйrignon and Christophe Hurlin unveiled RunMyCode (runmycode.org), a pilot platform for linking research datasets and code with scholarly articles. The site links published papers with a RunMyCode "companion website" that provides a real-time environment where researchers can rerun the computations reported in the paper and reproduce the experimental findings reported. Initially launched with 40 econometrics and finance papers, the platform is an innovative attempt to use the Web to enhance the reproducibility and verifiability -and thus the reliability-of scientific research. Funds from this grant support a project by Columbia University's Victoria Stodden, Chief Science Officer of RunMyCode, to expand and enhance the platform. Over 16 months, Stodden will test the RunMyCode model in a number of additional fields, including computational mathematics, statistics, and biostatistics. Stodden will also pilot integration with existing scholarly platforms, enabling researchers to discover relevant RunMyCode companion websites when looking at online articles, code repositories, or data archives. Additional funds support the development of a comprehensive business plan and funding strategy for RunMyCode.

Though working paper repositories have become integral to a number of fields, including high-energy physics and economics, the impact of working paper circulation on the actual practice and production of research is relatively unexplored. For example, does circulation of working papers on digital platforms actually improve the quality of the work, whether in revised drafts or in final published form? How do researchers decide what to spend time reading, given the lack of a referee system? Can usage data from working paper repositories predict ultimate publication in refereed journals and citation counts of articles after formal publication? Funds from this grant support a research project by Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT and his Ph.D. student Heekyung Kim aim to explore these and other questions using the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) as a case study. In order to isolate the impact of the circulation of research in working form, they will draw on SSRN's logs of web server traffic, working paper citation data, and full-text analysis of individual papers to compare the usage and citation of papers posted in bulk by departments as they join SSRN (which are often already published elsewhere) with that of papers that have evolved as working papers on SSRN in advance of publication. SSRN will also perform a randomized experiment of different search algorithms on the live site in order to better understand user discovery and filtering behavior. In addition to this research, grant funds will support a workshop to bring together publishers and platform developers with economists and other social scientists studying scholarly communication to discuss existing research findings and potential future collaborations in this area.

We know from server log analysis that a substantial and growing percentage of the readers of any online academic article arrive not because they are browsing a given journal or author, but through the results of a search query using a search engine like Google or Bing or Proquest. We know little, however, about how researchers decide which items in search results are worth reading or citing or about how these changing information discovery and consumption patterns influence the choice of where one publishes one's work. This grant supports work by David Nicholas and Carol Tenopir of the University of Tennessee to better understand the behavior of academics as both producers and consumers of scholarly literature, in particular the role that judgments of trust and quality play in choices of publication channel, citation, and time investment in reading new material. Nicholas and Tenopir have built a unique corpus of web usage data from a number of major publishers' online platforms, which they will mine for insights into user behavior. Patterns of behavior in that usage data will inform the design of a series of focus groups and a broad survey to investigate reading and dissemination channel choices, and a series of "critical incident reports" will drill deeply into the underlying motivations for citation by asking select authors to walk through the discovery of and rationale for each citation in their most recent paper's bibliography.

This grant provides three years of support to New York University's Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & TV for its continuing efforts to provide opportunities for emerging filmmakers to work with practicing scientists, to incentivize these filmmakers to produce high-quality scripts that engage with scientific themes or topics, and to facilitate the development of those scripts into completed films. Grant funds will support an annual colloquium that brings together film students and working scientists, expert advisors to ensure the accuracy of scientific content, and a yearly awards program that provides development funds to student screenwriters and filmmakers who submit the most engaging, entertaining, and accurate scripts on scientific topics.

Funds from this grant support three innovative annual awards programs at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts that urge students to write, direct, produce, and animate scripts that touch on scientific themes or feature scientists, mathematicians, or engineers as major characters. The first, aimed at student screenwriters, awards $15,000 to the best science-themed script submitted. The second provides $22,500 in production support to turn two compelling, accurate science-themed scripts into completed films. The third, aimed at animators, awards $15,000 in production support to a high-quality science themed animation project. Other grant funds support stipends for science advisors for student film projects to ensure the accuracy of scientific content, and for an annual science colloquium that educates students on exciting new scientific advances. Taken together, the USC program provides a rising generation of filmmakers with a powerful introduction to the narrative possibilities of merging science and film.