Resource Implementations for Data Intensive Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences | 18 517

Opportunity Information: Apply for 18 517

The National Science Foundation (NSF) grant opportunity called "Resource Implementations for Data Intensive Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences" (Funding Opportunity Number 18-517) is a research and development funding program aimed at building practical, ready-to-use data resources and analytic capabilities that can push forward data-intensive research across the social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences. It sits within NSF's broader initiative known as Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR), which focuses on improving how researchers collect, manage, integrate, analyze, and use large and complex data to generate new scientific insights.

At its core, the program is looking for proposals that do more than explore an idea or run a pilot. The expectation is that awardees will deliver a finished product within the budget of the award. That finished product could be a large-scale next-generation database, a substantial enhancement of an existing data resource, and/or an analytic technique or toolkit that makes it possible to work with complex SBE data in new ways. A key theme is usability: the resources and tools should be user-friendly, meaning they should be designed so that researchers beyond the original development team can realistically adopt them in their own work without excessive friction.

The kinds of deliverables envisioned include databases that bring together large, complex, or previously siloed information relevant to SBE research, along with the associated structures needed to make that information genuinely useful for science (for example, standardized documentation, harmonized variables, metadata, and mechanisms that support discovery and access). On the analytics side, the program also supports methods or techniques that enable researchers to make better scientific use of modern data sources, such as tools for integrating datasets, handling scale and complexity, improving measurement, or extracting meaningful patterns from high-dimensional or messy data. The emphasis is not simply on technical novelty for its own sake, but on advancing fundamental research in SBE fields by enabling research questions that were previously out of reach due to data limitations or analytic barriers.

Another central requirement is impact. NSF signals that successful projects should have significant effects either across multiple fields or within broad disciplinary areas of the SBE sciences. In practical terms, the agency is encouraging resources that can serve as shared infrastructure for many investigators, research communities, or subfields, rather than narrowly tailored datasets or tools that only support a single project. The goal is to expand the frontier of what researchers can study by making new forms of data-intensive inquiry possible, whether through broader coverage, better linkage across sources, improved temporal or geographic resolution, richer behavioral measurement, or more powerful and accessible analytic workflows.

Administratively, this is a discretionary grant program under the Science and Technology and other Research and Development activity category, listed under CFDA number 47.075, and offered by the National Science Foundation. Eligibility is described as unrestricted, meaning it is broadly open to different types of organizations and entities, subject to any additional clarifications in the full solicitation text. The opportunity record indicates an expected number of about four awards. The posting lists an award ceiling of 0, which typically signals that a fixed cap is not specified in that summary field and that applicants need to consult the solicitation and program guidance for realistic budget expectations and constraints. The opportunity was created on November 19, 2017, with an original closing date of February 28, 2018.

In summary, this NSF SBE HDR opportunity is designed to fund the creation of mature, usable, and broadly impactful data resources and analytic techniques that function as research infrastructure for the SBE sciences. The program prioritizes deliverables that enable new kinds of data-intensive research and that can substantially benefit research communities by lowering barriers to working with large-scale or complex social, behavioral, and economic data.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Resource Implementations for Data Intensive Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.075.
• This funding opportunity was created on Nov 19, 2017.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Feb 28, 2018. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 4 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

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