NONUS: A No-Onus Platform for Generating Grant Reports

Advancements in science and technology are rapidly disseminated through publications, patents, blogs, and the social networks. However, the process behind creating the science or technology is hardly curated. This is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for federal agencies who not only fund the science projects and monitor their progress but also make science policy decisions to regulate fundings in various areas. Most federal agencies, currently, are made aware of science advancements through year-end reports that are submitted by the investigators of the research project. To aid federal agencies in monitoring science projects and timely understand the overall impact of science we are creating NONUS, a no-onus platform that compiles data about a science project from a variety of data sources to generate a report This includes Web data sources, patent databases, institutional data, and the federal agencies themselves. The objective is to enable federal agencies to generate measures of social, economic, and scientific value by using all data that is created during a research project in a scientific discipline. In this paper, we describe the technical challenges in creating NONUS.