Overview

Social Science One implements a new type of partnership between academic researchers and private industry to advance the goals of social science in understanding and solving society’s greatest challenges. The partnership enables academics to analyze the increasingly rich troves of information amassed by private industry in responsible and socially beneficial ways. It ensures the public maintains privacy while gaining societal value from scholarly research. And it enables firms to enlist the scientific community to help them produce social good, while protecting their competitive positions. Social Science One's inaugural project on “the effects of social media on democracy and elections” offers researchers privacy-preserving access to Facebook data; funding from seven nonprofit foundations from across the ideological spectrum (pooled and regranted by the Social Science Research Council, SSRC); and a new type of peer pre-review service designed to speed scientific progress and shorten time-to-publication.