The licenses developed by Creative Commons have become an essential set of tools to patch gaps in the international system of copyright, creating a parallel, opt?in intellectual property regime that doesn't require country?by?country legislative change to implement. With those licenses fairly well integrated into modern practice, Creative Commons is embarking on a year?long process of strategic planning to determine where and how they can best have an impact in new areas, including science. This grant provides partial support to Creative Commons as it undertakes this process. Funds will augment a November meeting focused on "open science" and nine months of subsequent work on three key themes: licenses for open-access scholarship, legal and technical infrastructure for open data sharing, and the role of patent licensing in science.

Funds from this grant to information scientist Christine Borgman and anthropologist Sharon Traweek at the University of California, Los Angeles support a robust, three-year ethnographic research program to study scientific data practices and develop recommendations about needed skills and relationships within scientific teams who collect and manage data. Borgman, Traweek and their research group will will carry out an ambitious "2x2" research program, comparing projects that produce large volumes of homogeneous data with those involving smaller amounts of heterogeneous data as well as projects at earlier and later stages of their life cycles. The four sites to be studied include the Dataverse Network at Harvard, the Center for Embedded Network Sensing, a new National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded center for data-driven science and the transfer of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data from Fermilab to long-term homes at Johns Hopkins and Princeton. The research will help develop a better knowledge about existing data practices in modern science, inform future infrastructure investments, and clarify new roles around issues like data curation.

The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) as a whole aims to achieve transformational understanding of carbon's chemical and biological roles in Earth's interior. A multidisciplinary, decade-long effort, the DCO consists of a distributed but closely coordinated set of observational efforts and analytical instruments united by shared databases and a commitment to open access. The program leaders have set ambitious global goals, for example, to reduce the range of estimates of total carbon in Earth's mantle from a factor of twenty to a factor of two, to establish the techniques that resolve ambiguities about possible biotic versus abiotic hydrocarbon production, to accomplish the first global 3-D census of deep microbial life (presented in interactive 3-D!), and to produce a comprehensive database of thermochemical properties and speciation of carbon-bearing fluids and phases at the pressure and temperature conditions of the upper mantle. To meet its objectives, the DCO has organized into four "directorates," three of which-Reservoirs and Fluxes, Deep Energy, and Deep Life-have already been funded through previous Foundation grants. This grant to the University of California, Davis will provide partial funding for two years of operations of the DCO's final directorate, concerned with the most basic physics and chemistry of carbon in the extreme conditions of the deep crust and mantle. When we think of basic natural science, we may recall subjects from high school and college courses such as phase diagrams and equations of state. A phase diagram is a type of chart used to show conditions at which thermodynamically distinct phases (such as solid, liquid, or gas) can occur at equilibrium. An equation of state describes a state of matter under a given set of physical conditions such as temperature, pressure, and volume. These are the subjects of the fourth directorate. One reason so little is known about the deep carbon cycle is ignorance of the basic physics and chemistry of carbon at the pressure and temperature conditions of Earth's interior. Even phase diagrams and equations of state do not exist for relevant carbon-bearing fluids and minerals at the prevailing conditions deep inside Earth. Over the next two years, an international team led by University of California, Davis physicist Giulia Galli will make observations, conduct experiments, and build models concerned with thermodynamics of carbon bearing systems in the crust and mantle, dynamics and kinetics of deep carbon processes, and mineral-fluid interactions under extreme conditions. Its results, such as the database of thermochemical properties, will be essential for the other directorates and for the success of the Deep Carbon Observatory as a whole.

With Sloan Foundation support, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has brokered the development of a voluntary agreement among nuclear reactor vendors to abide by an industry-wide set of principles meant to increase the safety and security of nuclear facilities. This grant funds a year of follow-up activities subsequent to the formal adoption of the principles on September 15, 2011. Funded activities include briefing governments on the final text of the Principles of Conduct; conducting outreach to reactor operators, the World Association of Nuclear Operators, and other stakeholders encouraging them to adopt and abide by the principles; convening a meeting a review meeting to monitor implementation of the procedures set out in the Principles; developing processes to enable sharing of best practices across the industry; and working with nuclear reactor vendors to create an independent secretariat.

Funds from this grant provide partial support to INTERPOL to develop a Radiological and Nuclear Terrorism Prevention Program (RNTPP). Building on the success of their Biological Terrorism Prevention Program, INTERPOL 's work plan for developing the RNTPP will include organizing three terrorism prevention courses and one tabletop terrorism prevention exercise per year for three years, holding a international working group meeting to produce a report targeting the needs of police services in preventing nuclear and radiological terrorism, developing an investigative handbook, and designing and deploying five e-learning modules. Partnering with the International Atomic Energy Agency, INTERPOL will also develop a joint course aimed specifically at educating and training emergency personnel and other likely first responders to potential nuclear or radiological attacks.

No central authority tracks updates to an article or a dataset as it moves through various publication channels or institutional, disciplinary, or personal repositories over the course of its lifetime. A scholarly research paper, for example, might be available on a preprint server, the author's home page, a journal's website, and in an institutional repository. Imagine the difficulty an author would face should she wish to add a passage about updated findings to previous versions of the paper. The proliferation of copies means online materials behave surprisingly like physical paper; once you print out a copy of an article, the author can't push revisions to your copy. To address this need, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is beginning a project to convene a group of key computer and information scientists to develop a standard for the versioning and synchronization of web resources. They also plan to hold a series of workshops that follow the community development process, resulting in a codified standard that meets the needs of publishers, repositories, and other stewards of scholarly products. Alongside other work on data citation, annotation, and canonical author identifiers, the resulting NISO standard would be a valuable tool to facilitate the publication of scholarship and research data on the web, and is likely to be useful in other contexts as well. Funds from this grant will provide partial support for NISO's efforts over the next two years.

From a user's perspective, rapid-publication "megajournals" like PLoS ONE share a common problem with preprint servers like arXiv or the Social Science Research Network: without traditional quality indicators, researchers are left having to make sense of an ever-growing pile of undifferentiated articles. Readers need better mechanisms at the article level to enable them to see in a moment how one paper relates to others in terms of citation, usage, and other indicators of quality so that they can easily make informed choices about which papers are most relevant to their own research and interests. This two-year grant to the Public Library of Science supports efforts to develop, deploy, and promote just such article-level metrics both for PLoS and for the wider academic community. Funds will support three related activities. First, the PLoS team will extend their existing publishing platform to pull in data well beyond basic download counts, from inbound web links to usage statistics via popular research management platforms like Mendeley and Zotero. Second, PLoS will substantially refine the interfaces used to present that data, testing a number of design approaches to determine what visualizations are most helpful to their users. Finally, PLoS will launch a substantial outreach program, circulating white papers and engaging both open-access and commercial publishers in a broad conversation about article-level metrics adoption. Code developed through this grant will be released under a free/open-source license.

Funds from this grant support a project by the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications to study the feasibility of creating an online, open-access Mathematical Heritage Library. Issues to be addressed by the study include evaluating the potential value of such a library, identifying desired and useful capabilities for the library, assessing potential obstacles and challenges to the development process, and estimating probable costs of the library's development, deployment, and maintenance.

This grant funds a project by New York University's Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & TV to spur the production of high-quality, feature-length films about science and technology through a competitive awards open to all NYU film students. Each year for the next three years, NYU will offer $100,000 to the best student script exploring scientific, mathematical, or technological themes or featuring a scientist, mathematician, or engineer as a main character, with award funds to be used to turn the script into a feature length film. NYU will administer the awards process, accepting applications, convening a faculty panel to select quarter-finalists, advising filmmakers on needed script revisions, and arranging for scripts that advance as semi-finalists to procure an appropriate science advisor to ensure technical accuracy. Three scripts moving on to the final round will each receive $5,000 awards.

As the U.S. retirement landscape has shifted from one dominated by defined benefit plans (DB) to one dominated by defined contribution plans (DC), older Americans have had to assume more responsibility, as well as more risk, in ensuring their long-term financial security. To that end, they must make complicated income strategy decisions: how long to work; when to retire; whether to work post-retirement; and how strategically to utilize their DC assets and Social Security benefits. This grant supports a project by Stanford economist John Shoven, and Occidental College professor Sita Slavov to analyze and evaluate the potential financial benefits of a specific income strategy that they refer to as the "series" strategy. Utilizing this strategy, older Americans would first deplete their DC assets before drawing on their Social Security benefits, hence using their retirement resources serially. Shoven and Slavov plan to clarify how-under specific conditions that individuals and couples face, such as both working or one earning more than the other-the "series strategy" could lead to more attractive returns relative to the more typically-used "parallel" strategy, where older Americans simultaneously use their defined pension accumulations to supplement Social Security, hence using them in parallel to one another. Preliminary analyses suggest there are substantial financial benefits to the "series" strategy for older Americans, in large part due to the fact that Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation and increase as initial payments are delayed. Addition grant funds will support the publication of a publicly available brochure laying out Shoven and Slavov's conclusions and a conference directed at informing federal policymakers, researchers, financial advisors, and other relevant stakeholders about the research.