NATIONAL CENTER FOR DIGITAL GOVERNMENT AND SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY INITIATIVE TO BUILD NATIONAL BETA SITE FOR ETHICS IN SCIENCE & ENGINEERING

Amherst, MA – Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government and the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Initiative, and Marilyn Billings, Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, have been awarded a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Integrative Research to beta test cybertools and cyberinfrastructure for an interdisciplinary, multimedia, and international online beta repository to support ethics in science and engineering. The project is based at the Center for Public Policy.

The project was developed to respond to new federal legislation, the America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act. The beta site will be designed to guide faculty in science and engineering to ethics resources to support mentoring and training primarily of graduate and post-doctoral researchers. Use of web 2.0 tools and an international approach will enable more effective training of future generations of scientists, engineers, and research scholars and contribute to a more responsible and ethically-trained workforce.

According to Fountain, “the ability to freely, quickly and easily locate and review materials for use in training future generations of scientists and engineers is invaluable. A beta site that compiles existing materials with the objective of making them as freely and easily accessible and useful as possible, while incorporating web 2.0 and social networking tools that might enhance and expand usability, is the starting point for a national digital library for the 21st Century.”

For more information about this project, the National Center for Digital