The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust has announced grants totaling more than $6.4 million to three nonprofit organizations working to promote open, accurate, and collaborative science.

The grants are the first awarded through the trust's new Biomedical Research Infrastructure Program, which works to improve research outcomes and speed biomedical discoveries by funding novel collaborative research platforms, data management tools, and training initiatives. Recipients in this funding round include Sage Bionetworks, which was awarded nearly $2.6 million over three years to integrate its DREAM Challenge program into Synapse, an innovative bioinformatics platform, and incorporate a "Wall of Questions" into the platform, enabling real-time online discussions around specific biomedical research inquiries; the Hypothes.is Project, which will receive $2 million over three years to enhance the functionality and extend the reach of its annotation platform, which connects readers to source information; and the Mozilla Foundation, which was awarded nearly $1.8 million over two years to expand the capacity of its Mozilla Science Lab, a hub for the open research community.

"The biomedical research enterprise faces a number of structural challenges, including outdated and incompatible technologies, incentives that promote individual interests, and ongoing budget cuts, which prevent collaboration, impede access to data and, ultimately, limit the potential for life-saving laboratory breakthroughs," said Helmsley Trust CEO John R. Ettinger. "As we developed this program, we identified an unmet funding need for tools and best practices that can harness the burgeoning power of big data to address these challenges and shift the research paradigm."