Funds from this grant support the continuation and completion of work by an interdisciplinary team led by Granger Morgan at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The team is attempting to quantify the challenges and opportunities associated with transitioning the U.S. high-voltage electricity transmission system from alternating current (HVAC) to direct current (HVDC).  A transition to direct current has several potential advantages that could aid in decarbonizing the energy system.  For instance, direct current is more efficient than alternating current at transmitting significant quantities of electricity over long distances. That is important for the future viability of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar, where electricity, to be maximally useful, needs to be generated in windy or sunny locales and then transmitted over long distances.  Second, high voltage DC power lines can be sited alongside AC lines and sometimes in areas where AC lines cannot, thereby providing another tool to help advance clean electricity technologies. Using a method called expert elicitation, which asks subject matter experts to assess the likelihood of a range of factors associated with the technology’s development, the CMU team will closely examine the development of the novel power electronics technologies that are crucial to make the switch from HVAC to HVDC. This project will place a particular focus on the development of novel transistors, switching devices, and other power electronics necessary to advance HVDC lines. The result will be the identification of a set of well-informed parameters that can inform models designed to assess the likely costs and performance of a future HVDC system in the US.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is an important tool in the fight against climate change. Carbon dioxide gas is captured following fossil fuel production or other industrial processes, then compressed and pumped underground under extremely high temperatures and pressures, and stored in depleted oil and gas wells or, in some cases, in underground salt caverns or saline aquifers. A key concern with CCUS technology is the ability to verify that the carbon dioxide remains in place and stored underground. If the carbon dioxide leaks from the disposal wellbores, this not only impairs the effectiveness of the sequestration process, but it can contaminate other underground water regions nearby. These wellbores are harsh environments to monitor, under intensely high pressures and chemically corrosive. Such environments are not friendly to the delicate conditions that most sensors need to operate effectively.  This grant will fund work by researchers Debbie Senesky at Stanford University and Pingfeng Wang at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop and deploy a novel, durable sensor system capable of operating in the harsh conditions of a CCS wellbore and thus able to monitor whether the sequestered carbon dioxide is staying put or seeping out. The project has the potential to significantly advance understanding of the effectiveness of CCS sequestration, and thus to help inform the future development of these technologies in the fight against greenhouse gas emissions. The project will train at least two graduate students and is expected to result in a number of academic publications and the development of new sensor technologies.

L Less heralded than innovation or the creation of new technologies is the maintenance of technological systems: the sometimes unsexy but always vital work of keeping these systems running over time. Maintainers update older systems to be interoperable with newer ones, find and fix bugs, develop and install patches to ensure security and stability, and scan the horizon for new threats to the continued operation of the system. This grant provides three years of funding to The Maintainers, a network of scholars and practitioners devoted to providing support to those involved in the maintenance of critical technological and social systems.  Founded in 2015 and directed by Andrew Russell (SUNY Polytechnical Institute), Jessica Meyerson (Educopia Institute) and Lee Vinsel (Virginia Tech), the Maintainers holds conferences and workshops, connects practitioners and researchers, develops and disseminates best practices, and advocates for the essential social role played by maintainers and their work.  Grant funds will be used over the three year grant period for a number of activities to help build and strengthen the maintainer community, including numerous virtual and in-person events, the creation of two new discipline-specific maintenance subcommunities, the development of new tools and infrastructure for use by the community, and the creation of a strategic plan focused on long-term sustainability.

In 2016, the Foundation first funded the Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project, led by information scientists Sean Goggins and Matt Germonprez, at the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska at Omaha (respectively). The CHAOSS project focuses on the development of metrics, software, and practices to improve the transparency of open source community health. With respect to metrics, the CHAOSS project advances open source community health with respect to project evolution, risk, value, and diversity, equity, & inclusion.  With respect to software, the CHAOSS project uses the Augur software developed through this funding to analyze activity logs, and draw comparisons across entire software ecosystems, and identify anomalies within and across projects using machine learning and AI in an explicitly ethical manner. This enables community stakeholders to make judgements about the health of open source communities and projects using a combination of their own knowledge, and the metrics, data analysis, and insights generated through CHAOSS and Augur. Demand for CHAOSS has been substantial, and the program is seeing use by a number of key players in the open source development space, including partners from both academe and practice. The project has also become essential infrastructure for academic studies of open source practices as well as a source of metrics for research software assessment.  This grant provides three years of support for the continued development and expansion of the CHAOSS project.  Grant funds support the ongoing development and maintenance of the CHAOSS metrics and software and the hiring of additional support staff, as well as a set of specific projects in diversity, equity, & inclusion, open science, journalism, and ensuring the safety of critical systems and infrastructure.  Other grant funds will advance the development of funding models to facilitate the long-term, sustainable operation of the project.

The Make Data Count (MDC) initiative has worked with global research stakeholders and through the Research Data Alliance (RDA) to develop the building blocks for responsible research assessment metrics for research data, to better understand the impact and reach of data. Not only has the initiative developed a community-vetted standard for the reporting of data usage metrics, is has also created a set of server-side tools that allow easy implementation of the standard by existing data repositories.  Initial partners already implementing the standard include Dataverse, Zenodo, Figshare, Dryad, institutional and governmental repositories. Funds from this grant provide support for the continued expansion and increased adoption of the MDC data metrics standards and framework. Led by Daniella Lowenberg at the California Digital Library, the MDC team will focus on three key groups of activities over the two-year grant period. First, they will make it dramatically easier for less-resourced repositories to implement and benefit from data metrics by developing a log analysis server and expanding an existing event data aggregator to include dataset metrics. Second, they will work through the publisher consortium network, CrossRef, to encourage journal publishers to implement best practices for data citation. Third, they will work in collaboration with the bibliometric research community to begin studying data usage across research disciplines, through the development of an open corpus of data for the study of data citation and usage trends. This work will continue to elevate research data in international discussions about research assessment and value, with goals of developing accessible and understood open data metrics.  

Fraudulent journals charging fees to publish works by academic authors without checking the submitted articles for quality or legitimacy and without providing editing, review, or other services provided by more legitimate journals, is commonly known as “predatory publishing.”  Predatory journals deliver little to no value to their authors and flood the scientific corpus with poorly-vetted, seldom-cited articles. This grant funds research led by Kyle Siler at the Universitй de Montrйal to study predatory academic journals.  Starting with journals in a set of widely-circulated lists of predatory publishers, Siler and colleagues will begin by refining a definition of “predation”ѕ;the diverse variety of legitimate journal practices makes precise definition controversialѕ;and then compare articles published in predatory and non-predatory venues through a set of lenses: inclusion in vetted databases, citation, full-text analysis, authorship, and variability within publication. Siler and his team will produce peer-reviewed papers as well as briefings for scientific stakeholders. In addition, the researchers will release the first open-access, article-level dataset on the “dark web” of seldom-indexed illegitimate and/or quasi?illegitimate academic journals.

The Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) is a community of professional and citizen scientists, educators, and other open science enthusiasts that are working to advance discovery through leveraging the scientific opportunities created by open hardware.  Funds from this grant provide two years of support for GOSH’s core community-building and development activities.  Funded activities include planning and hosting of the GOSH annual meeting, development of a model for regional and topic-focused GOSH events, outreach to university administrators and other potential funders, and a “collaborative development program” that would seek to support open hardware projects through an experimental combination of online project development with time-bounded in-person intensive collaboration.

With help from a prior grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation in 2017 launched an ambitious project to add structured metadata to files in the Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia’s repository of more than 65 million photos, videos and other media files. The project allowed users to add machine readable information to each file, including information on the file creator, the copyright status of the file, and the object, event, or subject depicted. This structured metadata makes files in the Commons much more easily discoverable, searchable, and shareable, and since 2017, metadata has been added to more than 11 million files in the Commons.     Funds from this grant support an expansion of this project and will help Wikimedia expand its use of structured metadata to the entire universe of Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia and Wikidata. The potential benefits of this project are significant. For example, with content metadata, machine prompts could suggest appropriate images to add to a page being edited or could identify data that appears on the Spanish-language version of a Wikipedia article, but is missing from that page in Vietnamese. Grant funds will support the development of a set of structured data standards to apply across Wikimedia products, the creation of editing tools and interfaces to help users implement those standards, and outreach and public engagement efforts to engage the global Wikimedia community in the process. Over the three-year grant period, the project aims to add structured metadata to 5 million Wikipedia articles.

The Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP), led by Professors Kevin Gibson and Kenneth Ridgway at Purdue, extends across eight campuses from New York to Alaska for the support of indigenous (Native American/Alaska Native) students.  SIGP seeks to increase the number of indigenous graduate students obtaining degrees in STEM; to maintain a critical mass of indigenous graduate students at each site and collectively across the Partnership; and to create supportive and knowledgeable local educational communities focused on indigenous students.  Partnership members provide first-class scientific education and training in concert with students’ cultural identity, and prepare SIGP students to succeed in their chosen professions and to contribute to their communities, institutions, and disciplines. Over the 48-month grant period, SIGP plans to recruit 123 Native American graduate students while maintaining a retention/graduation rate that equals or exceeds 85%.  Through a new undergraduate “feeder” program with the University of North Carolina, Asheville, SIGP also aims to increase recruitment of students from the southeastern United States.

Funds from this grant provide graduate scholarships, mentoring, community building, and other support to cohorts of M.S. and Ph.D. students participating in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP). Supported students are American Indian or Alaska Native scholars enrolled in graduate degree programs in STEM fields at one of the SIGP’s participating campuses: the University of Alaska (Anchorage and Fairbanks), the University of Arizona, the Montana University System (University of Montana, Montana State University, and Montana Tech), Purdue University, and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Called Sloan Scholars, these students receive fellowships in amounts varying between $20,000 and $40,000.