Github is a new online service that helps programmers track and share their work. Based on "Git," a protocol for version tracking and the coordination of distributed contributions to software development, Github has become an extremely popular home for software projects both large and small, and has seen increasing use by scientists who develop software as part of their research. One notable feature of Github is its business model. There's no charge to set up an account and start posting, but there's a fee to keep your work private. This grant funds a research project by Jim Herbsleb of Carnegie Mellon's Institute for Software Research to evaluate how transparent "opt-out" development environments like Github affect the development of scientific software. Conducting case studies and analyzing archival data from Github, Herbsleb will investigate several key theses about the relationship between transparency and scientific software development, including how software developers use transparency to accomplish technical tasks, the role transparency plays in relationships between developers and the scientific community, and the difficulties transparent development environments pose for effective software development. Herbsleb's research has the potential to form the basis for policy recommendations on how transparency can be used most effectively to foster the development of scientific research.

Many researchers fail to appropriately capture, log, and version their work as it moves through the research process from data collection through multiple stages of cleaning and preparation to analysis. In part, this failure is due to the difficulty of logging changes in data as it moves from one software platform or set of scripts to another, each of which might be ideal for a particular part of the research process, but none of which are tied together by a common platform that can track the provenance of data as it moves from one system to the next. For decades, experimental scientists captured their research activities in lab notebooks. What is needed is a revitalization of that old idea: a lab notebook for the modern era of computational science. This two-year grant funds the development of just such an electronic lab notebook environment, called the IPython Notebook. Built on top of Python, R, and other widely used software languages in the data science community, the IPython Notebook is an early prototype computational platform that allows researchers to run a wide variety of high-powered data cleaning, modeling, and analysis algorithms inside a common computational environment. Grant funds will help IPython developers make the leap from early adoption to mainstream usage, focusing particularly on the development and scaling of features in three key areas: interactive exploration of data, collaborative authoring, and dissemination/sharing. Additional grant funds cover the salary of a full-time outreach coordinator to give presentations and tutorials at universities and professional society meetings, and funds to support the development of a set of live "notebooks" for use in introductory statistics classes, to better introduce students to the platform.

Instituted two years ago to reward the most promising student screenwriters, the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize is awarded annually to the single best student screenplay from among the Foundation's six film school partners: American Film Institute, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, UCLA, and USC. Winning scripts demonstrate how scientific content can become the basis for an entertaining and marketable film, and previous winners-Robert Cohen's Bystander and Grainger David's Pennystock-have gone on to garner significant media and industry attention. Selected by an independent panel of scientists, actors, and industry insiders, winners of the award receive a $30,000 production grant to help turn the script into a completed film; support from a noted industry mentor to guide the project; a committed science advisor; and marketing (meetings, readings, events), distribution, and networking support to maximize the screenplay's chances of production and distribution. This grant provides continued support for the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize for two years.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the development, launch, and operation of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Scheduled to launch in April 2013, the DPLA aims to create an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that will make the nation's scientific and cultural heritage universally accessible to the public. Funds from this grant support the continued development of the DPLA platform architecture and interface, community-building efforts and technical support to expand and strengthen the growing network of content providers, and administrative funds for the hiring of an executive director and two full time staff members.

Orphan works are those works whose copyright owners are either unknown or un-locatable after a diligent search. They comprise a significant percentage of all copyright works. (For example, about 50 percent of Haathi Trust's 10 million volumes are estimated to be orphan works.) Because libraries and archives are wary of running afoul of copyright restrictions on orphan works, they often avoid digitizing them or making them available online, thus vastly limiting public access to millions of important books and documents. This grant funds a project by American University law professor Peter Jaszi to develop best practice guidelines for the legal digitization and distribution of orphan works. Funds will support an initial paper explaining the legal obstacles to the dissemination of orphan works, 10 focus group sessions to discuss orphan work issues and policies with relevant stakeholders around the country, a paper outlying best practices, and dissemination activities to publicize those practices to libraries, universities, museums, and other stakeholders.

The Forum on Microbial Threats (Forum) was created in 1996 to address emerging, re-emerging, and novel infectious diseases and has become one of the leading places to address issues in microbial ecology and microbiology. The Forum gathers experts, develops agendas, conducts three meetings and two symposia per year, and publishes reports. Funds from this grant provide partial support to the Forum over a three-year period. Among the planned topics for future workshops and symposia is "The Movement of Microorganisms and the Microbial Ecology of the Built Environment", a workshop of interest to the Foundation's Microbiology of the Built Environment Program and one that will help set the stage for future efforts towards a full National Academies' study and report on the microbiology of built environments.

The most popularly used survey of older Americans-the National Institute on Aging's (NIA) Health and Retirement Study (HRS)-has a limited number of questions that address with any specificity the ways that Americans work into their 60s and 70s as they transition from full-time employment to full-time retirement. What is needed is an opportunity to devise and test questions that will better capture the aspirations, expectations, and work patterns of aging Americans so as to improve the measurement and modeling of older Americans' evolving labor market behaviors. This grant to fund the work of New York University economist Andrew Caplin provides such an opportunity. Caplin has formed a partnership with NIA and Vanguard, one of the world's largest investment management companies, to createe a panel of older Americans, entitled, the MINYVan panel. This MINYVan panel will allow Caplin and colleagues to experiment with questions that will better measure labor market preferences and opportunities of an aging population. They will also pose questions concerning expectations of future work and pay and questions concerning hypothetical behavior in various possible future contingencies. For example, they will investigate whether or not an individual who chooses to stop work believes that they would be able to return to work for high pay at some point in the future. By studying panel responses Caplin and colleagues will begin to develop appropriate structural models of labor market behavior and design a complementary survey that will focus on labor market preferences and behaviors. This work will not only yield interesting insights in itself, but will be useful to future discussions about how how labor-market activities questions on the HRS can be made more robust.

This two-year grant funds a project by John Durant and the MIT Museum, leaders in the Science Festival Alliance, to launch 12 new science festival initiatives in communities with "relatively small resource bases," supporting festivals in communities that would otherwise lack the budget or experience to launch their own. The Science Festival Alliance has identified four lead festivals-in Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, and Missouri-to act as models. Harnessing experienced mentors, the Science Festival Alliance will use modest challenge grants and how-to resources to help local science festival efforts get off the ground. Additionally, they will strengthen connections within the science festival community while establishing methods expanding festivals to under-resourced communities. This grant is a promising way to expand the science festival experience to communities across the country and, if successful, would represent a 33 percent increase in the 36 local science festivals that currently exist in America.