Fraudulent journals charging fees to publish works by academic authors without checking the submitted articles for quality or legitimacy and without providing editing, review, or other services provided by more legitimate journals, is commonly known as “predatory publishing.”  Predatory journals deliver little to no value to their authors and flood the scientific corpus with poorly-vetted, seldom-cited articles. This grant funds research led by Kyle Siler at the Universitй de Montrйal to study predatory academic journals.  Starting with journals in a set of widely-circulated lists of predatory publishers, Siler and colleagues will begin by refining a definition of “predation”ѕ;the diverse variety of legitimate journal practices makes precise definition controversialѕ;and then compare articles published in predatory and non-predatory venues through a set of lenses: inclusion in vetted databases, citation, full-text analysis, authorship, and variability within publication. Siler and his team will produce peer-reviewed papers as well as briefings for scientific stakeholders. In addition, the researchers will release the first open-access, article-level dataset on the “dark web” of seldom-indexed illegitimate and/or quasi?illegitimate academic journals.

The Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) is a community of professional and citizen scientists, educators, and other open science enthusiasts that are working to advance discovery through leveraging the scientific opportunities created by open hardware.  Funds from this grant provide two years of support for GOSH’s core community-building and development activities.  Funded activities include planning and hosting of the GOSH annual meeting, development of a model for regional and topic-focused GOSH events, outreach to university administrators and other potential funders, and a “collaborative development program” that would seek to support open hardware projects through an experimental combination of online project development with time-bounded in-person intensive collaboration.

With help from a prior grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation in 2017 launched an ambitious project to add structured metadata to files in the Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia’s repository of more than 65 million photos, videos and other media files. The project allowed users to add machine readable information to each file, including information on the file creator, the copyright status of the file, and the object, event, or subject depicted. This structured metadata makes files in the Commons much more easily discoverable, searchable, and shareable, and since 2017, metadata has been added to more than 11 million files in the Commons.     Funds from this grant support an expansion of this project and will help Wikimedia expand its use of structured metadata to the entire universe of Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia and Wikidata. The potential benefits of this project are significant. For example, with content metadata, machine prompts could suggest appropriate images to add to a page being edited or could identify data that appears on the Spanish-language version of a Wikipedia article, but is missing from that page in Vietnamese. Grant funds will support the development of a set of structured data standards to apply across Wikimedia products, the creation of editing tools and interfaces to help users implement those standards, and outreach and public engagement efforts to engage the global Wikimedia community in the process. Over the three-year grant period, the project aims to add structured metadata to 5 million Wikipedia articles.

The Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP), led by Professors Kevin Gibson and Kenneth Ridgway at Purdue, extends across eight campuses from New York to Alaska for the support of indigenous (Native American/Alaska Native) students.  SIGP seeks to increase the number of indigenous graduate students obtaining degrees in STEM; to maintain a critical mass of indigenous graduate students at each site and collectively across the Partnership; and to create supportive and knowledgeable local educational communities focused on indigenous students.  Partnership members provide first-class scientific education and training in concert with students’ cultural identity, and prepare SIGP students to succeed in their chosen professions and to contribute to their communities, institutions, and disciplines. Over the 48-month grant period, SIGP plans to recruit 123 Native American graduate students while maintaining a retention/graduation rate that equals or exceeds 85%.  Through a new undergraduate “feeder” program with the University of North Carolina, Asheville, SIGP also aims to increase recruitment of students from the southeastern United States.

Funds from this grant provide graduate scholarships, mentoring, community building, and other support to cohorts of M.S. and Ph.D. students participating in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP). Supported students are American Indian or Alaska Native scholars enrolled in graduate degree programs in STEM fields at one of the SIGP’s participating campuses: the University of Alaska (Anchorage and Fairbanks), the University of Arizona, the Montana University System (University of Montana, Montana State University, and Montana Tech), Purdue University, and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Called Sloan Scholars, these students receive fellowships in amounts varying between $20,000 and $40,000. 

Each summer, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, an independent nonprofit based in Berkeley California, invites 18 talented mathematics undergraduates to the UC Berkeley campus for the summer to provide them with a high-quality research experience in the mathematical sciences.  The program recruits talented undergraduate students from gender and racial/ethnic populations historically underrepresented in the mathematical sciences and focuses on equipping them with the training and the support network to enter and succeed in graduate study.  The program receives high marks from student participants, and program alumni apply and are admitted to graduate programs at a rate much higher than the national average.  Grant funds provide core operating support to the program for a period of four years.

This grant supports the production and airing of Your Brain, a two-hour NOVA television special about the latest developments in neuroscience. To be hosted by Heather Berlin, a neuroscientist, clinician, and science communicator, the special will use Berlin’s personal history, work with patients, and research on the neural basis of the unconscious as a frame for discussing a variety of important developments in neuroscience, including brain-machine interfaces, creating artificial brain tissue, understanding consciousness, and cutting-edge treatments for mental health disorders. Grant funds will support production of the special, along with associated promotion and outreach to ensure a wide, diverse audience.

Surface-to-volume ratios are orders of magnitude larger indoors compared to outdoors. As a result, air-surface interactions play a significantly more important role in indoor chemistry than in typical atmospheric chemistry.  This grant provides ongoing support for the work of surface chemist Vikki Grassian of the University of California, San Diego to examine the fundamental chemistry of indoor surfaces. Using a variety of techniques, including X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, vibrational spectroscopy, and atomic force microscopy, Grassian and her team will observe and analyze the interactions between gases and particles, on the one hand, and various surfaces commonly found indoors, on the other.  The team’s focus will be on better understanding the fundamental mechanisms of reaction chemistry, including oxidation reactions, surface reactions of chlorine-containing cleaning products, and nitrogen oxide chemistry that leads to the formation of nitrous acid. Grassian’s experiments have been designed with an eye toward ensuring collected data can be usefully integrated into existing models of indoor air chemistry.   This project will result in new knowledge on the fundamental chemistry that occurs on indoor surfaces and new data for input into indoor air quality models. The results will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at conferences and meetings, with at least two students and one postdoc being trained.  

This grant provides partial support to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) for a consensus study on the research needs and implications of emerging indoor chemistry research.  NASEM will convene an ad hoc committee of scientific experts and leaders to examine the state-of-the-science regarding chemicals in indoor air. It will collect new findings about chemical reactions, sources of chemicals, and the abundance and distribution of chemical species indoors.  The committee will then examine how these new findings fit into existing scholarship about the link between chemical exposure, air quality, and human health. Based on this information, the report will contain consensus findings on the key implications of this scientific research, including potential near-term opportunities for incorporating what is known into practice, and will identify topics and issue areas where additional chemistry research will be most critical to understanding the chemical composition of indoor air and the consequences of adverse exposures. The report will also identify current methodological or technological barriers to advancing our understanding of indoor chemistry and areas where enhanced coordination or collaboration are necessary for continued progress.   Grant funds will support forming and convening the committee; at least one information-gathering workshop; and the composition, review, publication, and dissemination of the committee’s report.

This grant supports a consensus study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) on the evolution of behavioral economics on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the field. Overseen by an independent committee of 15 experts from diverse fields—including economics, psychology, and cognitive science—the report will draw on a wide range of perspectives to synthesize four decades of research, catalog the field’s increasing relevance to policymaking, celebrate the work of seminal researchers, raise unaddressed challenges, and identify promising avenues for future study. The final report, tentatively titled Assessing Behavioral Economics at Age 40: A Consensus Study, will be widely disseminated and available to academics and the public alike.