Hypothes.is is a web-based annotation platform that enables users to annotate online documents and share their annotations with others. Supported by the Sloan Foundation from conception through prototyping, the platform now has 10,000 regular users and is seeing increasing use among lawyers, journalists, and academic researchers. Interest from the academic publishing community has been particularly noteworthy, as several publishers have developed their own, expensive, internal annotation systems as part of their publication review and editing process. This grant supports efforts by Hypothes.is to move the platform away from philanthropic support and toward independent financial sustainability. Grant funds support the hiring of a head of business development, software modifications that will allow the platform to function on a software-as-a-service model; and the creation of administrative interfaces for client publishers.

Funds from this grant support the continued development and expansion of PressForward, a new software platform that aims to speed the dissemination of scholarship by allowing researchers to quickly and easily aggregate online articles, white papers, reports, and blog posts into online digital journals. Built atop the powerful and popular WordPress platform, PressForward enables researchers to impose structure on the diverse variety of scholarly materials proliferating on the web, pulling related materials together that are currently scattered across different preprint servers, personal blogs, and institutional archives.   Over the next three years, grant funds will help the PressForward team, headquartered at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, continue the development of the platform. Planned activities include working with institutional partners to launch 12 new digital projects powered by the platform, outreach to build and strengthen the growing PressForward user base, and development of plans for long-term fiscal sustainability.