Category Archives: oa.sloan_foundation

Assessing Open Source Program Offices’ Role in the Academic Research Enterprise – Ithaka S+R

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“Open source software is the backbone of the digital economy and is critical to the development and maintenance of transparent, inclusive, and secure digital infrastructures. Universities and their employees rely on it daily for everything from basic communication to advanced research, and in turn make substantial contributions to the open source resources used within and beyond higher education. Over the past several decades, major corporations have created centralized offices, often known as Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), to coordinate and nurture open source activities across their organization. While these offices have proven their value in private sector contexts, they are just beginning to make inroads into higher education, in large part due to leadership from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Sloan Foundation has recently funded the establishment of OSPOs at 12 US research institutions. These pilot OSPOs will institutionalize open source principles, software, and cultures with the goal of improving the teaching, learning, and research practices on campus and creating social and economic benefits in and beyond the university.

Last month, the Sloan Foundation engaged Ithaka S+R to assess the effectiveness of university OSPOs in facilitating the development and maintenance of open source software. Through the “Leveraging OSPOs to Advance the Academic Research Enterprise” project, we will identify the characteristics that maximize the impacts of university OSPOs within and beyond campus. Our research will focus on three crucial areas: 1) alignment with unit-level and university-level strategic frameworks; 2) viability and sustainability of organizational structures and labor models; 3) growth of open source research cultures and practices.”

DPLA to make cultural treasures freely available on Wikipedia with new Sloan Foundation support | DPLA

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“A $750,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Digital Public Library of America will fuel a multi-year effort to connect America’s cultural heritage institutions with Wikipedia, the world’s free online encyclopedia. This grant will offer an opportunity to make millions of cultural treasures from hundreds of American libraries, archives, and museums freely available online, including Renaissance manuscripts from Philadelphia’s Science History Institute; historic photos of the Pacific Northwest from Seattle Public Library; and portraits of 18th-century actors from the University of Illinois….”

Sloan Foundation Funds New Office to Support Open Source Activities

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Carnegie Mellon University’s Helen and Henry Posner, Jr. Dean of the University Libraries Keith Webster has received a grant of $650,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to establish the Carnegie Mellon University Open Source Program Office (OSPO). In addition to establishing a central resource for open-source activity across campus, the OSPO will explore the ecosystem of software around a new core facility and government R&D.

The newly created office will be led by G. Sayeed Choudhury, currently the associate dean for Digital Infrastructure, Applications, and Services and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University, home to the first university-based OSPO in the United States.

 

Introducing IOI’s Research Fellows

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“With the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we are excited to introduce IOI’s first Research Fellows: Anne Britton and Teri Wanderi. They’ll be working with us over the next few months to expand and enhance our research to support and sustain open infrastructure….”

NYU Wins Major Grant From Alfred P. Sloan Foundation To Expand Capabilities For Archiving Digital Scholarship

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“The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded New York University a grant of $520,503 to enable libraries and other institutions to reliably archive digital scholarship, with a focus on research code, for long-term accessibility. Vicky Rampin, NYU’s Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian, designed the project with her co-principal investigator, Martin Klein, Research Scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

The project follows Investigating and Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience (IASGE), an extensive NYU Libraries study also funded by the Sloan Foundation and led by Rampin, examining the landscape of current research software archiving efforts and the behavior of academics using Git and Git Hosting Platforms for scholarly reasons. The findings of both facets of IASGE underscore the vulnerability of scholarship on these platforms, from lack of holistic archival practices for research code to gaps in the research software management landscape that make long-term access more difficult. As Rampin and Klein wrote in their most recent proposal: “These factors leave us with little hope for long-term access to and availability of our scholarly artifacts on the Web.” …”

News and Stories – Research Guides at New York University

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“The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded New York University a grant of $520,503 to enable libraries and other institutions to reliably archive digital scholarship, with a focus on research code, for long-term accessibility. Vicky Rampin, NYU’s Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian, designed the project with her co-principal investigator, Martin Klein, Research Scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

The project follows Investigating and Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience (IASGE), an extensive NYU Libraries study also funded by the Sloan Foundation and led by Rampin, examining the landscape of current research software archiving efforts and the behavior of academics using Git and Git Hosting Platforms for scholarly reasons. The findings of both facets of IASGE underscore the vulnerability of scholarship on these platforms, from lack of holistic archival practices for research code to gaps in the research software management landscape that make long-term access more difficult. As Rampin and Klein wrote in their most recent proposal: “These factors leave us with little hope for long-term access to and availability of our scholarly artifacts on the Web.” …”

Reimagining Educational Practices for Open (REPO) | FORCE11

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“At Jisc we’ve been committed to open research practices for years. Recent events have highlighted again exactly why all this matters. The ongoing COVID-19 public health crisis demonstrates our global connectedness and we’ve all seen that opening up research into the virus has enabled a global research and development effort to develop vaccines and treatments.

Our open research team works nationally and internationally to influence policy in favour of open scholarship. We partner with like-minded organisations around the world to develop services that support open approaches and to build the plumbing for the new processes, links, standards, workflows, policies, and incentives….”

Reimagining Educational Practices for Open (REPO) | FORCE11

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“At Jisc we’ve been committed to open research practices for years. Recent events have highlighted again exactly why all this matters. The ongoing COVID-19 public health crisis demonstrates our global connectedness and we’ve all seen that opening up research into the virus has enabled a global research and development effort to develop vaccines and treatments.

Our open research team works nationally and internationally to influence policy in favour of open scholarship. We partner with like-minded organisations around the world to develop services that support open approaches and to build the plumbing for the new processes, links, standards, workflows, policies, and incentives….”

WikiCite awards 23 grants & eScholarships to improve open citations – Diff

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“Palm-leaf manuscripts from Bali; Legislation from Brazil; and Newspapers from Nigeria. These are just three of 23 groups and individuals across 15 countries which received WikiCite grants – the majority of which are outside the OECD. Project categories include: content creation & upload, outreach & training, software development, and documentation/localization. Combined these grants are valued at $69,000 USD, and we received more than double the number of excellent applications than the budget could support.

The WikiCite initiative focuses the development of open citations and linked bibliographic data to serve free knowledge and is itself supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation….”

DPLA cultural artifacts coming to Wikipedia through new collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation

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“In an effort to make artifacts from cultural heritage institutions more accessible to all, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the national aggregator of digital heritage collections, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, are collaborating to incorporate DPLA’s cultural artifacts into Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Funded by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this collaboration will expand the availability of artifacts such as books, maps, government documents, photos, and more from U.S. cultural heritage institutions across the web.  …

The collaboration will build off the Wikimedia Foundation’s existing Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons project, a multi-year effort to lay the infrastructure that will make metadata about media files within Wikimedia Commons machine-readable and easily accessible by search online. The project will help unlock collections of images, documents, and other precious cultural artifacts for easy search and reuse both within Wikimedia Foundation websites and broadly across the web….”

Funded Partnership Brings Dryad and Zenodo Closer | Dryad news and views

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“With increasing mandates and initiatives around open data and software, researchers commonly have to make a choice about where to deposit their non-article outputs. Unfortunately, systems that are built to accommodate these objects work separately and can make the process more difficult. As a result, data, code, figures, and other outputs go to a variety of disconnected places, or improper homes (i.e. code with the wrong license or data not curated). To tackle this issue, and make open research best practices more seamless for researchers, we are thrilled to announce a partnership between Dryad and Zenodo….

To jumpstart this collaboration, we are proud to have been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant that will enable us to co-develop new solutions focused on supporting researcher and publisher workflows as well as best practices in data and software curation. By focusing on integrations between our systems, leveraging data and software expertise, we can both extend the reach of our services and open up more opportunities for broader research communities.  We are looking forward to re-imagining the submission process for researchers and how we can better support our journal publishing and institutional communities along the way….”

Coko Open Science – achieving FAIR data : Collaborative Knowledge Foundation

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“The European Commission has identified the opportunity to save €10.2 billion per year by using FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). As policies begin to emerge requiring FAIR data, it’s timely to consider the open infrastructure needed to make embed FAIRness into the research and research communication workflows and outputs.  

Coko recently received a grant from the Sloan Foundation to build DataSeer, an web service that uses Natural Language Processing to identify and call out datasets associated with research articles. Datasets are often not explicitly identified, let alone made FAIR and accessible. The first step is knowing how many datasets were used in a body of work. DataSeer “reads” documents and finds mentions of dataset creation and use. Based on the context, DataSeer can offer recommendations to curate, deposit, add metadata too, or otherwise better handle datasets. DataSeer can fit into the workflows of researchers, publishers, aggregators, funders, and institutions….

Before FAIR compliance can be assessed, the full range of datasets associated with a research project must first be identified. There are often ‘hidden’ datasets mentioned in the text that are included among the ‘official’ outputs. DataSeer finds these mentions and help  to authors to identify and share all of the datasets involved in their work. …”

Frictionless Data Tool Fund

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“The Frictionless Data Tool Fund, supported by the Sloan Foundation, is providing a number of mini-grants of $5,000 to support individuals or organisations in developing an open tool for reproducible science or research built using the Frictionless Data specifications and software. We welcome submissions of interest from 15th Feb 2019 until 30th April 2019….”

Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research

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“From September 2018 and over a period of three years, the Frictionless Data team will focus on enhanced dissemination and training activities, and further iterations on our software and specifications via a range of deep pilot projects with research partners.”