Multinational financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) can sometimes become insular, politicized, ponderous, and unaccountable. That is why Raghuram Rajan from the University of Chicago and Barry Eichengreen from the University of California, Berkeley, plan on establishing an independent "Council on International Monetary Reform" (CIMR) to monitor, advise, consult with, and critique the IMF. These two professors are among the world's most respected and engaged authorities on international financial and monetary economics. The CIMR will consist of fewer than 18 members representing a balanced variety of countries, ideologies, and economic approaches. The grant budget provides for a CIMR planning conference followed by three annual meetings. The Council will interact with senior IMF officials, with attendees at the main IMF meetings each fall, and with the media as well. Establishing this CIMR is just one component of the Sloan Foundation's developing initiative on international financial regulation. The goal of this entire initiative is to inform, prepare, and eventually institute significant reforms of the international financial and monetary system.

Surprisingly few ideas from the field of international economics have turned out to be useful either in the run-up to the recent financial upheaval or in its aftermath. To reinvigorate the field of international macroeconomics, Kristin Forbes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Jeff Frankel of Harvard University are organizing a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) project on "The Global Financial Crisis." Pairing the two of them illustrates how their project, like everything NBER does, will be strictly non-partisan and aimed at developing fundamental understanding rather than explicit policy recommendation. For example, three basic research questions this project will concentrate on are: How did global imbalances contribute to the crisis? How was the crisis transmitted internationally? How has the global nature of the crisis affected macroeconomic policy ranging from fiscal and monetary policy to bank regulation and the role of the dollar? The plan is to issue a broad call for proposals to prepare and present papers on these topics, commission a dozen of the best submitted in the competitive solicitation, post them as working papers, and hold a pre-conference with assigned discussants to provide critiques. Refocusing and revitalizing research on international macroeconomics like this is just one component of the Sloan Foundation's developing initiative on international financial regulation. The goal of this entire initiative is to inform, prepare, and eventually institute significant reforms of the international financial and monetary system.

This is a request for Maura Marx, executive director of the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), to build the organization's base and public profile, and to develop a national digital strategy that will appeal to policymakers as well as libraries. We created the Open Knowledge Commons out of a previous grant to the Internet Archive due to the need for strengthening existing partnerships and forging new alliances with libraries, archives, funders, legislators and the public behind a universal digital library. Maura Marx, recruited after a national search, spent her first year trying to work out a rapprochement with the Internet Archive and when that became unfeasible, recruiting a new Board of Directors and setting up a new not-for-profit organization, incorporated in Massachusetts. Marx now requests one year of support to help consolidate and expand the role of OKC in developing a blueprint for a national strategy for book digitization that will be useful to policy makers as well as the library community and to create demonstration projects that showcase the benefits of such a blueprint. OKC is the only organization devoted exclusively to this vision and it fills a very important gap. Marx proposes to move OKC to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and to work to develop the intellectual, social and legal framework to foster the strengths of this new digital environment. We view the Open Knowledge Commons as a key vehicle to develop and implement our own program in digital information technology as we seek to create a realistic digital library with universal appeal.

The Foundation helped create the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC) in order to have more community building efforts in our open digitization initiatives and to catalyze new large?scale collaborations among libraries. This request is the first major digitization effort from OKC, and it involves creating an open digital library focusing on the history of medicine as a theme and drawing on the participation of five major institutions: the National Library of Medicine (NML); the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University; the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University; and the New York Public Library. There are enthusiastic letters of endorsement from all five institutions, which include three of the leading collections in the world (NML, Harvard, and Yale). Following an initial phase of digitization of public domain monographs, they would also create a de?duplication database to prevent redundancy of efforts, a tool based on that used by the successful Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The BHL is a model for this theme?based approach to scanning. The history of medicine is a very rich discipline intellectually that cuts across many fields. It is estimated that the entire field numbers about 1,500,000 volumes, of which half (750,000) are pamphlets, including dissertations, one third (500,000) are serial volumes, and the remaining sixth (250,000) are monographs. This effort would digitize 30,000 monographs or just over 10% of the existing collection. This effort would be a collaborative venture taking into account the scholarly needs and sensitivities of the academic and library communities which have not always felt well-served by existing digitization efforts. Given the new economic environment as well as the Google juggernaut, we need to be more selective and strategic about our digitization efforts and to try to build wider collaboration and coordination among interested users that will also benefit the general public.

WNYC requests a one-year renewal for Radiolab, the award-winning science series produced in conjunction with National Public Radio (NPR), for the production and distribution of ten one-hour science-themed shows. WNYC's Radiolab, one of the most innovative public radio shows in the country, which Sloan helped launch, also produces ten feature science-based pieces that are broadcast on National Public Radio magazine shows Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, and over 20 podcasts worth of additional material. Radiolab is unique, fresh, informative and inspiring-an exemplary radio show about science with the most original sound heard in many years that has found a large, receptive, and relatively young public audience. Radiolab continues to be an asset for Sloan's Program in Public Understanding of Science, Technology, Business, and Economics; it is a smart science radio series with an interesting sound whose popularity continues to grow.

Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association, Inc., requests two years of funding for enhanced economics coverage on The PBS NewsHour (The NewsHour), both on-air and online. The NewsHour continues to be the most serious and effective news show on television and has impressively maintained an audience of 1.2 million viewers nightly, higher than every news show except Fox News and the networks. Sloan's 2008 grant for public understanding of economics on The NewsHour resulted in a very impressive output-twice the number of on-air spots by Paul Solman about economic and financial literacy as originally envisioned. A reviewer remarked of Solman: "Among us professors of economics he is regarded as the best economics reporter on television." Few people even try to achieve this, and none are as qualified as Solman or have a better platform from which to teach. As one reviewer noted, "His reports are as unbiased and accurate as the discipline of economics allows them to be. He rarely presents a perspective as his alone. Instead, he finds the relevant experts, and lets them speak for themselves." An important component of this grant is the Web site. Currently, The NewsHour Web site attracts about half a million visitors a week and about 100,000 visit the three Sloan-supported economics sites. Just under a million users have visited Solman's site in the past six months and 720,000 have downloaded his material. This request represents a 25% reduction from the previous grant-from $1 million to $750,000 per year-for 40 ten-minute economics segments on the show each year, plus enhanced educational outreach through the Web, social networking sites and other media. The reduction reflects in part our diminished financial resources and in part it is a signal to The NewsHour that we expect them to take very seriously our suggested improvements to their Web site and our desire to more prominently feature Paul Solman on it. Support of this series gives us a direct line to Solman for suggesting topics and guests and provides the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, Business, and Economics Program with an outstanding and cost-effective vehicle for providing strong, consistent, economics coverage.

The "copyright clause" of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Digitization has made intellectual property issues like this so important that, for the first time, the President has appointed a "copyright czar" to serve in the White House. Students face huge fines for sharing songs over the Internet, for example. Incentives to create or share innovations appear threatened. And the proposed "Google Settlement" could (arguably) monopolize access to certain books, including "orphan works," as discussed at the recent meeting hosted by the Sloan Foundation on "Open Access and Dissemination of Knowledge" and a brief filed by the United States Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court reviewing the Settlement. How can research help? Whereas patenting has been studied extensively by legal scholars and economists, thorough theoretical and empirical analyses of copyright policy and its effects in the digital age remain yet to be done. To this end, Berkeley Professor of Economics, Law, and Public Policy-Suzanne Scotchmer-proposes to study the benefits, costs, and distributional consequences of potential solutions to a set of copyright problems. One is compulsory licensing by collective rights management organizations like Broadcast Music, Inc. (music performance rights) and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. This project will help provide theoretical foundations for a Sloan Foundation initiative that will sponsor further theoretical, empirical, and interdisciplinary research on copyright policy and information goods.