Category: Grants

MIT Press funds works from authors underrepresented in their fields

MIT Press announced that it received significant donations from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to The Fund for Diverse Voices. With this funding, MIT Press is committed to publishing at least 10 new books annually for the next three years by authors who have been excluded or underrepresented in their fields. Through the MIT Grant Program for Underrepresented Voices “current and prospective authors with strong proposals for a book-length work who have significant personal experience or engagement with communities that are underrepresented in scholarly publishing” may apply through acquisitions editors in the sciences, arts and humanities. Grants of $15,000 can cover costs to support research, writing and publishing with MIT Press.

Recent books published with support of The Fund for Diverse Voices” include:

  • Power On! by Jean J. Ryoo and Jane Margolis, illustrated by Charis JB – “a lively graphic novel follows a diverse group of teenage friends as they discover that computing can be fun, creative, and empowering.”
  • Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation by Kevin G. Bethune – “Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving—how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity.”
  • Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond: The Life of Astronomer Vera Rubin by Ashley Jean Yeager – “How Vera Rubin convinced the scientific community that dark matter might exist, persevering despite early dismissals of her work.”

Humanities Commons to expand to STEM education research

Michigan State University announced it has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to build out its open-source Humanities Commons platform to establish a Commons that focuses on STEM education research. Established in December 2016, the Humanities Commons currently facilitates collaboration among thousands of humanities scholars and practitioners around the world through discussion forums, open access publication of scholarly works, profiles, networks and a robust search and discovery platform. It is a not-for-profit platform operating under a shared governance model. The Humanities Commons is free for anyone to join and use.

The NSF Award describes this new STEM Commons as a “Discipline-Based Education Research plus (DBER+) Commons” that will “…build consensus around and capacity for open science, the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) practices, principles, and guidelines for use in undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate, and postdoctoral science education research activities.” Other goals include advancing quality control of metadata for research products, stewardship practices, interoperability, reproducibility, sustainability, equity, and democratization of access to research data.” This is a $1.2 million, three year grant starting January 1st, 2023.