This grant supports efforts to increase adoption of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), an enterprising new system that aims to provide a unique, persistent identifier to every researcher on the planet, allowing scholars, content aggregators, and the public to easily pull together research associated with that researcher’s ID, wherever it is published, however the author’s name appears. Funds from this grant will support expansion of ORCID through a small grant competition that challenges universities, professional societies, and other academic institutions to implement ORCID identifiers into existing repository, learning management, academic profile, conference management, and other technology platforms. Ten winners will be chosen from grant applicants based on the quality of the plans submitted and the likelihood that their work will lower barriers to ORCID adoption by peers.

One of the goals of Sloan’s Scholarly Communication program is to better facilitate the discovery and review of research products available on the Internet. Since many of these materials (from working papers to datasets) do not appear in conventional journals, a small but growing community has begun to explore the idea of alternative metrics of value and impact, ranging from downloads and inclusion in personal reference manager databases to social media references.Funds from this grant support the continued development of ImpactStory, an innovative altmetrics platform that aggregates citations and other mentions of academic scholarship on the Internet, including references from arXiv, Mendeley, PLOS, Dryad, PubMed and Scopus, as well as Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Grant funds support development of the platform and the creation and implementation of a long term institutional sustainability plan.

While there are currently many different ways to find out how much a given article or book has been cited, there is no way to know how many times it has appeared on a syllabus, and the impact of scholarly research in the classroom is a blind spot for which we have no accessible data. One could, for example, imagine a “syllabus count” alongside a citation count, not just for articles and books, but also for all sorts of other resources from datasets to websites. Beyond individual impact, a broad, computable archive of syllabi could be a valuable resource for research on the evolution of disciplines.This grant supports efforts by Joe Karaganis of the American Assembly to develop just such a resource.  Karaganis has assembled a diverse team of data providers, application designers and other collaborators to coordinate a planning and prototyping process aimed at bringing a robust syllabus archive to life.

Altmetrics aggregators who draw together diverse sources of data about the use of research products face a fundamental challenge: the myriad dissemination and archival platforms used by academics can make it difficult (if not impossible) to get consistent and normalized access to the data they need. While a general consensus is emerging among online publishers and repositories of articles, datasets, software, and other materials that such impact data could be valuable to their users, no clear standards exist governing how organizations should make that data accessible to others.This grant funds efforts by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) to lead a two-year standard-setting process for altmetrics data. NISO will begin by hosting a series of scoping meetings over the first 12 months of the grant, bringing stakeholders together to map the most salient sources of data based on demand from altmetrics services as well as the researchers, funders, and deans that represent altmetrics end-users. After synthesizing those findings in a white paper for wide distribution, NISO will shift into a formal standards-setting process targeting the most pressing use cases, ultimately producing standard data exchange formats for adoption by those who produce and consume altmetrics data.

This grant provides one year of continued support to the Hamptons International Film Festival for a variety of interconnected activities to promote the development, production, and distribution of accurate, high-quality science themed screenplays and feature films. Supported activities include a feature film prize given to the best science-themed film submitted to the Festival; an accompanying panel and reception; a five-day screenwriters’ lab to assist writers with screenplays in development; a series of screenings of science-themed works in and around New York City; and a production grant to assist with the promotion of a high-quality science-themed film.

This grant provides two years of continued support for a series of initiatives at the Carnegie Mellon School of Dramatic Writing to encourage its film students to write high quality, accurate screenplays about science and technology or feature scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as major characters. Funded activities include a yearly symposium for film students introducing them to internationally recognized scientists; two semesters of training in screenwriting; guest-faculty workshops by accomplished mentor screenwriters; a program pairing students with scientific advisors to ensure the accuracy of scripts’ scientific content; the presentation of two awards for the best student science-themed script; and a variety of professional development activities, including industry showcases of student work in both Los Angeles and New York.

The grant provides two years of continued support to the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment (BioBE) Center, a pioneering research center founded with Sloan support and dedicated to developing a predictive science of the built environment microbiome through partnerships between architects and biologists. Over the next two years, the BioBE Center, led by microbiologist Jessica Green, will address two primary research questions: what dispersal vectors (e.g., ventilation and human occupancy) significantly influence the microbial profile of the built environment?  And what attributes of the built environment (e.g., building materials and interior temperature) shape microbial community composition indoors?  Research will be driven by the latest advances in microbiological instrumentation and methodology, including a climate-controlled chamber, microbiome diversity mapping, high throughput sequencing and analysis, and new visualization tools.  In addition to conducting basic research and disseminating results through peer-reviewed journals and conferences, the BioBE team will be involved in educating the next generation of built environment microbiologists, training at least one undergraduate student, three graduate students, two postdoctoral fellows, and two architectural research faculty; and developing a new undergraduate course focused on the biology of the built environment.

This grant supports the expansion of a major $9 million, multi-institutional research project funded by the National Institute of Health. The NIH study aims to determine the bacterial community composition of 340 paired house dust and infant stool samples in a case cohort epidemiological study. Sloan funds will enable the research team to expand their analysis to not just bacteria, but fungi. Led Dr. Susan Lynch of the University of California, San Francisco, the research team will perform high resolution fungal community profiling of the 340 paired samples, conduct a variety of statistical analyses to determine whether relationships exist between fungal and bacterial community composition in house dust and infant stool, and use multivariate regression analysis to relate fungal/bacterial house dust microbiome composition to measure house characteristics and allergic disease outcomes to identify key factors that influence the home and infant stool microbiome and are related to human health status.

Audit/correspondence (AC) studies are the most frequently used research design for ascertaining the extent of age discrimination in hiring. This design involves submitting nearly identical resumes online to posted job openings. Resumes differ only by the age of the applicant. Discrimination is ascertained if younger applicants get more call-backs than do older ones. This methodology, however, appears likely to generate bias in favor of finding age discrimination. Because resumes give both younger and older applicants the same, low level of experience, the older applicant will appear to have “holes” in her work history that are likely to be viewed unfavorably. On the other hand, perceived (but unmeasured) differences in the human capital investment of older workers might lead employers to prefer older to younger applicants, biasing the result of audit studies in the opposite direction.This grant provides support for two field experiments by David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine aimed at increasing our understanding of the limitations of the audit/correspondence framework. The first will field an audit study where the resumes of older workers are not identical with their younger counterparts, but instead include work experience commensurate with their age. A finding that older workers are still less likely to be called for interviews may better match the legal standard for age discrimination. A second audit study will be fielded for both types of older applicants—those with equal low levels of experience like in past studies, and those with experience commensurate with age. Differential employer response to these resumes will capture differences in indicators of human capital among older workers.

This grant to The Brookings Institution funds the work of economists Gary Burtless and Bary Bosworth, who are investigating whether longer lifespans coupled with longer work lives and delayed retirement leads to greater income disparities among Americans aged 60 to 74. Burtless and Bosworth will estimate the effects of delayed retirement on the distribution of annual incomes among workers and retirees between 60 and 74; assess the effects of delayed retirement on inequality trends among individuals past age 75; estimate the effects of delayed retirement and lengthening life spans on the distribution of lifetime incomes; and offer conclusions about the public policy implications of the changing relationship among income, expected longevity, and retirement behavior.The income distribution issues cited above are particularly important as Congress considers reforms to the Social Security and Medicare systems in order to maintain their financial solvency. The tradeoff between restoring financial balance and avoiding adverse distributional effects is a key consideration in designing sensible reforms. The results from this research are essential to understanding possible adverse distributional effects.