The Grand Challenges Summit has produced a draft white paper, A Grand Challenges-Based Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication and Information Science. The paper is available on PubPub and open for comment through October 31.

In March 2018, a global and multidisciplinary community of stakeholders came together for the summit on Grand Challenges in Information Science and Scholarly Communication.  Participants, including both traditional domain researchers and those aiming to democratize scholarship, worked together to identify, scope, and prioritize a common vision for specific research challenges related to information science and scholarly communications. An explicit aim of the summit was to identify research needs in order to develop scalable, interoperating, socially beneficial, and equitable systems for scholarly information. The draft white paper reflects the outcomes of those discussions.

“The scholarly ecosystem can be improved if communities work toward a set of common goals,” says Micah Altman, director of research at MIT Libraries. “Expertise and knowledge from the broadest possible community will make this a stronger set of recommendations.”

The paper is hosted on the open authoring and publishing platform PubPub, a project of the MIT Knowledge Futures Group that was initially developed by the MIT Media Lab. All are invited to comment and contribute to the community discussion through October 31. A final version of the paper is expected later this year.

The Grand Challenges Summit emerged from a recommendation of the MIT Task Force on the Future of Libraries report released in October 2016. It is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.