The Sloan Foundation Technology program announces over $5M in new grants

New grants supporting academic Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs)  

⭐  Keith Webster received a grant to establish the Carnegie Mellon University Open Source Program Office where, in addition to the core activities of setting up a central resource for open source activity across campus, they’ll be exploring the ecosystem of software around a new core facility and government R&D. 

⭐  Stephen Jacobs at the Rochester Institute of Technology received funding for continued support of Open@RIT, the university's Open Programs Office, which will continue supporting faculty, staff, and student Open Work of all kinds and will build capacity for external partnerships. 

⭐  The organizers of OSPO++ received support to coordinate community network activities to maximize the impact of open source program offices in universities. We’re excited to see community-building efforts for the growing number of OSPOs in the Sloan portfolio and beyond.

New grants for US research software sustainability

We’ve awarded grants to a few key individuals from the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI):

⭐  Karthik Ram with support from Code for Science & Society will be leading efforts to strengthen the community focused on the design, production, and maintenance of sustainable research software in the United States. 

⭐  Kyle Niemeyer of Oregon State University received funds to run several workshops on advanced topics in software development and engineering, training researchers in effective and sustainable practices for developing research software.

⭐  Daniel S. Katz received a grant to cultivate the development of policies that foster sustainable research software. He's actively recruiting for a post-doc to join him at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign -- please contact Dan directly if you are interested or have candidates to suggest.

New grants on user experience, publication workflows under Better Software for Science

⭐  Lavanya Ramakrishnan and the UX team in the Scientific Data Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory received a grant to study the user experience of scientific software. Their analyses will inform a prototype design system for scientific software user interfaces. 

⭐  Shelley Stall at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) received funding to work with the computational notebooks community to design and implement a publishing workflow for computational notebooks. This effort includes developing pilot solutions that will elevate notebooks as a format in scholarly publishing.  

Continued support for academic data science community building

⭐  Micaela Parker of the Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA) received a grant to continue building a community network of data science leaders, practitioners, and educators. This grant, matched by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, will enable new forms of community-driven resource building and sharing of approaches for thoughtful integration of data science best practices in higher education. Check out their growing list of Founding Members here.

New grant under the Exploratory program on virtual collaboration

⭐  Dan Cohen, Patrick Yott, and Evan Simpson of Northeastern University Library received a grant to implement and analyze support for scientific research teams who are working together on common aims but from multiple geographic locations. The team plans to leverage Northeastern’s newly launched Impact Engines, distributed collaborations, as their focus of study.

New grant under the Exploratory program on trust in algorithmic knowledge

⭐  Jodi Schneider of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Todd Carpenter of NISO received funding to create consistent community practices that will reduce the citation and reuse of retracted publications. This project builds on findings from Schneider's Sloan-funded study of retracted science. 

Grantee Spotlight  
Select updates from our active grantees

➤ Shobita Parthasarathy did a Q&A with Nature about their recent work on Large Language Models and its potential transformation on science. 

➤ Veronique Kiermer and the team at PLOS request 10 minutes of your time to fill out a survey to help them understand the researcher experience when serving on committees for hiring, promotion or tenure, or grant applications review.

➤ The ReSA/RDA/FORCE11 FAIR4RS Working Group released version 1.0 of the FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles), after ~2 yrs of work by over 500 people. 

➤ The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) just announced its new Open Hardware Trailblazer fellows, a cohort of university-based champions paving the way for open hardware on campuses.  

➤ Vishakha Agrawal and colleagues at Polytechnique Montreal shared their learnings from analyses of the visual contents in open source issue discussions (like mockups and screenshots).

Events

✅  Recent events we attended over the last few months: 

• Josh attended the first of an event series hosted by the Applied SciFi Project at ASU which explores science fiction storytelling as a tool for imagining and shaping the future of technology 

• Liz and Josh went to Princeton, NJ to spend time with several Research Software Engineers (RSEs) at the US-RSE Community Building Workshop 

• Josh was at the ACM CHI conference, where he participated in a workshop on Social Presence in Virtual Event Spaces 

• We also recognized many faces at the first International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation  

✅  Events we plan to attend in the next few months:

• August 1-12: We provided a grant to support CarpentriesCon 2022 which will be online this year. 

• September 7-9: We’ll be speaking at the Open Work in Academia Summit alongside other folks hosted by Open@RIT  

• October 24-25: We’re eager to learn from ADSA and US-RSE at their Fall Workshop on Career Paths (of data scientists and research software engineers in academic settings)

• October 26-29: We’re looking forward to the next Gathering for Open Science Hardware in Panama