Survey: Accelerating Spread of Early Findings from NSF Projects

* 1. In this survey, CIRCL invites your input on approaches to better support the spread of early findings from NSF projects.

The issue: In general, new designs and findings in any NSF portfolio spread slowly. Journal publications typically appear late in a project (or even after the project completes), conference presentations are not always posted (and lack a narrative), PI meetings are only attended by a few, and NSF annual reports aren’t public. Further, portfolios like Cyberlearning don’t have an agreed conference or journal to serve as the central archive, and both funders (NSF) and end-users need information about research-based insights in more easily understood formats.

At the same time, new patterns of behavior are emerging among researchers. For example, researchers are commonly using social media (Facebook, Twitter) to share project news (award, presentations, major accomplishments, videos, etc.) and are publishing early findings in blogs and other less formal, quicker formats. New formats like the Video Showcase have proved wildly popular. And ResearchGate and Academia.edu offer cross-cutting access to papers. CIRCL has found “primers” (agile, introductory research syntheses) to be popular, and the authors like writing them as long they get a citation. Some other fields (like physics) use ArXiv and other pre-print servers to disseminate findings faster.

We estimate that completing the survey should take 10-15 minutes. Please be sure to click done at the bottom of the last page when you have finished the survey.

Your participation is voluntary and does not involve any risk to you beyond that of everyday life.

If you have any unanswered questions about this survey, please obtain answers before agreeing to participate, below. You can email circl-info@sri.com at any time. If you have questions later, please email Dr. Jeremy Roschelle (Principal Investigator) at jroschelle at digital promise dot org (please fix the email).

This work is supported by NSF grants IIS-1233722, IIS-1441631, and IIS-1556486.