The shift to digitally-mediated forms of scholarship has been characterized by a substantial growth in channels for and diversity of scholarly work. We see this in the flourishing of content in preprint servers and rapid- publication channels like arXiv, PLoS ONE, and the Social Science Research Network alongside unconventional forms of scholarly communication like research blogs and personal websites, all of which enable scholars to put their work out for broad access. Part of the Foundation's emerging strategy to ease this transition is to support the development of new models of filtering and curating online scholarly materials. This three-year grant supports the work of Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM) in the development of a software platform that will enable professional societies and interdisciplinary networks of scholars to collectively organize and review relevant resources. Cohen and Scheinfeldt will undertake a detailed study of various models for aggregating scholarly content, as well as a broad landscape survey of new and changing techniques for managing content on the "open web." In addition to contributing to the general body of knowledge about collective information filtering systems, this research will also directly inform the development of CHNM's "PressForward" platform, a substantial modification of the popular "Wordpress" blogging application that will enable the aggregation and curation of online scholarly resources at both an editorial and community level. Funds from this grant also support the experimental expansion of PressForward, currently powering DigitalHumanitiesNow.org, into four additional scholarly disciplines.

Progress in science depends critically on a familiar but delicate system that rewards citations and priority. Scientists are rewarded for discovering something first, and they are rewarded for writing something that other scientists frequently reference. Though this familiar system provides well established norms for the citation of scholarly articles, there are not similarly accepted norms for citing scientific datasets. Funds from this grant will support a project by the National Research Council's Board on Research Data and Information to address how to attribute and cite scientific datasets. The Board will establish a steering committee to examine practices and standards, to hold a symposium and workshop, and to organize a joint series of meetings in cooperation with the CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation Practices.

Founded in 2000, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a driving force in the "open access" movement to make the results of scientific research available to everyone. PLoS's vision: a place where anyone from scientists to students to the public could access scientific research online and at no charge. PLoS essentially treats all scientific literature and its associated databases and commentary as a continuous, ever-growing relational database to be explored, mined, and recombined. Under traditional models, scientific papers are sequestered in a specialty, such as Arctic biology, even when the paper might have content equally relevant to marine mammals or molecular ecology. In 2008 and 2009 the Foundation provided grants to PLoS to develop a business plan for creating online "hubs" around scientific and medical subjects and then to create prototypes for subjects of special interest to Sloan, such as DNA barcoding and marine biodiversity. Importantly, PLoS links to all open-access material, not only to material published by PLoS itself. And it will also point to material that is not open-access, even if users may meet frustration in clicking on gated links. The Foundation increasingly sees the concept of PLoS hubs as central to scholarly practice in areas of Foundation interest, including emerging fields such as the microbiology of the indoor environment and Earth's deep carbon. Funds from this grant will support PLoS in the creation of online hubs as a mechanism for organizing scientific content after it is published.