Grants Database

The Foundation awards approximately 200 grants per year (excluding the Sloan Research Fellowships), totaling roughly $80 million dollars in annual commitments in support of research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. This database contains grants for currently operating programs going back to 2008. For grants from prior years and for now-completed programs, see the annual reports section of this website.

Grants Database

Grantee
Amount
City
Year
  • grantee: Wikimedia Foundation
    amount: $20,000
    city: San Francisco, CA
    year: 2017

    To help support a workshop on the citation of academic research across Wikimedia projects

    • Program
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Dario Taraborelli

    To help support a workshop on the citation of academic research across Wikimedia projects

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  • grantee: University of Maryland, College Park
    amount: $50,000
    city: College Park, MD
    year: 2016

    To support development and outreach activities of the SocArXiv preprint server

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Philip Cohen

    To support development and outreach activities of the SocArXiv preprint server

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  • grantee: Harvard University
    amount: $19,840
    city: Cambridge, MA
    year: 2016

    To support workshops on the creation of standards for entering temporal data into timeline visualization tools

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Alyssa Goodman

    To support workshops on the creation of standards for entering temporal data into timeline visualization tools

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  • grantee: Phoenix Bioinformatics
    amount: $814,300
    city: Redwood City, CA
    year: 2016

    To firmly establish a nonprofit subscription funding model as a viable option for sustaining research repositories

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Eva Huala

    A 2015 Sloan Foundation grant to nonprofit Phoenix Bioinformatics supported the development and initial deployment of a paywall service for scientific databases. Sloan support enabled the organization to generalize its technical infrastructure to offer database providers fine-grained metering of access (and the ability to flexibly set the boundary between free and paid access), and develop customer-facing tools to allow institutional and national subscribers to manage and report on subscription use. Based on an assessment of its operating costs and likely growth opportunities, the organization has developed a realistic, fee-based funding model that promises to deliver long-term, independent sustainability within the next two years. Funds from this grant provide operational bridge funding to the organization while it implements this plan.

    To firmly establish a nonprofit subscription funding model as a viable option for sustaining research repositories

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  • grantee: Cornell University
    amount: $445,244
    city: Ithaca, NY
    year: 2016

    To support the planning and technical prototyping of the next generation arXiv preprint server

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Oya Rieger

    Created by Paul Ginsparg, arXiv is a popular preprint platform that has become an essential scholarly communication tool in much of physics, mathematics, and computer science. It is also running on 25-year-old software written in a language (Perl) for which developers are becoming hard to find, and thus maintenance is increasingly expensive. arXiv’s Cornell-based leadership team is embarking on a campaign to support a soup-to-nuts rebuild of arXiv’s database, submission and review workflows, and public interface. In 2016, the team conducted a user survey to identify features most in demand and hosted a technical workshop to identify the challenges of a redesign. The next step is to move from general principles to initial design and prototyping, testing various infrastructure options for the full rebuild. Funds from this grant will support this 18-month planning effort.  

    To support the planning and technical prototyping of the next generation arXiv preprint server

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  • grantee: University of Texas, Austin
    amount: $635,261
    city: Austin, TX
    year: 2016

    To raise the visibility of and improve incentives for software work as a contribution in the scientific literature

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator James Howison

    The writing of scientific software is an increasingly important part of modern scientific practice. Properly rewarding such activity requires the wide adoption of new citation practices where authors formally recognize the software they use in their work. Yet a change in citation practices would leave untouched the scientific literature produced to date, which is filled with explicit or implicit mentions of software in the body, footnotes, figures, or acknowledgments sections of articles. Funds from this grant support a project by James Howison of the University of Texas, Austin, School of Information, to develop means to identify software citations from the current corpus of scientific papers. Howison will assemble a team that includes technologists Heather Pirowar and Jason Priem, compile a gold-standard dataset of software references in the scientific literature, and then develop a machine learning system trained on that dataset to recognize software references in scientific articles. The team will then deploy, test, and refine this system in three different prototypes.

    To raise the visibility of and improve incentives for software work as a contribution in the scientific literature

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  • grantee: Brave New Software
    amount: $124,770
    city: Los Angeles, CA
    year: 2016

    To improve the discovery, assessment of value, and impact of open source software

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Benjamin Nickolls

    To improve the discovery, assessment of value, and impact of open source software

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  • grantee: Princeton University
    amount: $20,000
    city: Princeton, NJ
    year: 2016

    To develop and test open source software to enable an open review process for academic books

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Matthew Salganik

    To develop and test open source software to enable an open review process for academic books

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  • grantee: American Astronomical Society
    amount: $448,500
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2016

    To advance the discovery, tracking, and preservation of scientific software by improving software citation practices

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Julie Steffen

    Recent technological advances have made it possible to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to software projects, allowing authors to cite them in just the same way they have traditionally cited a journal article or study. Yet we have not seen much movement toward the actual citation of software by authors—a problem, since citation remains the primary way to acknowledge valuable work among scientists. The problem appears to be cultural, not technical, and it thus makes sense to focus on change at a disciplinary level. Astronomy presents an ideal opportunity to model a best-practice approach to software citation in the sciences. This grant funds an effort by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to develop and implement a new "software broker" system that would automate the creation and management of metadata about software versions, licensing, and authorship. The move would prompt software developers to fully document their code in structured ways that could easily be imported into discovery tools like the Astronomical Data Service (ADS), which tracks citations across formal and preprint articles and serves as a search interface across the astronomy literature. Though developed within astronomy, most of the systems and workflows to be developed are generic and applicable much more broadly.

    To advance the discovery, tracking, and preservation of scientific software by improving software citation practices

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  • grantee: University of California, Davis
    amount: $20,000
    city: Davis, CA
    year: 2016

    To support a workshop to enhance and extend the functionality of the mybinder notebook computing platform

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Charles Brown

    To support a workshop to enhance and extend the functionality of the mybinder notebook computing platform

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