Issue 20 (October 15)

The recent Why Social Science? post comes from The Conversation, where Dr. Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University) writes about how social sciences and humanities programs can help prepare students for employment and navigating their next professional steps.

Read on for more.

Congress departed for the campaign trail on October 1 after passing a continuing resolution (CR) to extend the appropriations deadline to December 20 (see previous COSSA coverage). Expected to return on November 12 after the elections, Congress will return ready to draft the final appropriations bills or seek a second CR to allow for the new Congressional session to take the helm.

Stay tuned to COSSA’s continued coverage of Congressional news.

John Hopfield at Princeton University and Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, Canada were awarded the physics Nobel Prize for their research on artificial neural networks. The Nobel laureates received several funding grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), including Hinton’s award for the Search Methods for Massively Parallel Networks from the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS) program, to support this work. Following the announcement, NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan praised, “The laureates brought their understanding of the fundamental physical workings of nature into a new realm and created an entirely new foundation that has led to what we now call AI — perhaps the greatest innovation of our generation.”

More information about laureates can be found on the NSF website. 

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), is seeking stakeholder input into the development of its Public Access Plan. NIJ is interested in hearing from NIJ grantees, criminal justice practitioners, researchers, publishers, and other interested parties.

Development of the plan aligns with the Biden Administration’s 2022 directive that federal agencies make peer-reviewed publications resulting from federal funding freely available to the public immediately following publication. However, it is important to note that given its size, NIJ is not required to comply with the 2022 memorandum, unlike larger federal science agencies (e.g., National Institute of Health or National Science Foundation). NIJ’s current policy includes an expectation that results are published in peer-reviewed journals; however, it does not mandate public access to these publications. Instead, grantees are required to notify NIJ of publications at the time of public release and are encouraged to index them with the National Criminal Justice Research Service (NCJRS) Virtual Library. Still, as the request for comment states, many publications resulting from NIJ support remain behind publisher paywalls and inaccessible to the public.

The new Public Access Plan will require grantees to deposit their accepted manuscripts in PubMed Central, the free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature maintained by National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine. The use of PubMed Central, according to NIJ, will allow for “all publications resulting from NIJ-funded research (including peer-reviewed publications, grant reports, and other documents published by the grantee or NIJ)” to be findable at a single location and linked to the NCJRS Virtual Library.

NIJ intends to implement its Public Access Plan for awards made in fiscal year (FY) 2025, and plans to include the following requirements:

• That all peer-reviewed publications resulting from NIJ-funded research will be made freely available to the public without delay, by requiring the authors to deposit their manuscripts in a public repository designated by NIJ.
• That the data underlying those publications will be made available at the time of publication.
• That persistent digital identifiers and metadata will be used to facilitate findability and reuse.

The request for comment includes a series of questions for interested stakeholders to consider. Public input should be submitted by email to public.access.nij@usdoj.gov and will be accepted through November 29. 

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) recently published an update to President Marcia McNutt’s State of Science address in which they reemphasized her main points from the speech, and brought in guest authors to expand on what is needed to improve the U.S. research enterprise (see previous COSSA coverage). This collection of articles includes: “K-12 Education” by Alexandra Fuentes; “Addressing Red Tape” by Matt Owens; “Bidirectional Collaboration” by James Manyika; “Cultivating Trust” by J. Marshall Shepherd; and “Learning to Listen” by Stephanie Diem.

In McNutt’s State of Science address, encouraging innate childhood curiosity was linked to strengthening the STEM workforce. To this point, Fuentes advocated for the enhancement of classroom experience through after school and summer programs, and strategic cross sector coordination to improve K-12 education.

Next, Owens expanded on McNutt’s call to reduce red tape by suggesting the White House establish a position for associate academic research enterprise to report on regulatory issues that are imposing a challenge for scientists.

Shepherd recommended training scientists on authenticity and empathy to improve trust in science, asserting this is the key to understanding social context and communicating more effectively with the public. On a similar note, Diem’s article emphasized the importance of communicating to the public, and suggested breaking down siloes among researchers and the public to communicate in a real, two-way conversation fashion that increases engagement and trust.

The collection of articles can be found on the NASEM’s website and the State of Science Address can be viewed here.

This article was contributed by COSSA Intern Paige Kirkham.

Research!America announced the application period for its Civic Engagement Microgrant Program is now open. The program awards grants of up to $4,000 to graduate student and postdoc-led groups in STEM (including social science) to design projects that create dialogue with public officials, local community leaders, and the public around issues of common concern. These funds provide opportunities for grantees to develop skills in areas such as communication and program planning, along with an understanding of public policy and government to have an impact in their local communities.

Applications are due November 4, 2024. More details are available on Research!America’s website.

The American Political Science Association (APSA) is accepting proposals for the Pracademic Fellowship Program on a rolling basis. The Pracademic Fellowship Program aims to bridge the gap between academia and the world of practitioners by supporting mid-career faculty members to work in federal government agencies in the Washington, D.C. area. Fellows work directly with decision-makers involved in programs of their interest and get a first-hand vantage point of a federal agency’s decision-making environment. The program is open to faculty members in political science, public management, public policy, public administration, and related fields, and is particularly well-suited to mid-career faculty taking advantage of overlaps with sabbatical opportunities.

More information about the opportunity can be found here. APSA is a COSSA governing member organization.