MIT has received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a summit on the Grand Challenges in Information Sciences and Scholarly Communication in spring 2018. Inviting experts from across disciplines and sectors, the summit aims to identify critical problems in information science that are solvable within 10 years and which have broad implications across the scholarly community.

Libraries Director Chris Bourg and Director of Research Micah Altman are the grant’s principal investigators. The summit will invite national and international thought leaders from a broad range of disciplines, sectors (corporate, nonprofit, government, university), and domains. Three consecutive 1.5-day workshops will produce draft research agendas in the areas of scholarly discovery, digital curation and preservation, and open scholarship.

The project is a direct outcome of the Institute-wide Future of Libraries Task Force, which was convened by MIT Provost Martin Schmidt in October 2015 and which released its preliminary report in October 2016. The Task Force recommended that MIT establish an initiative to enable bold experimentation and to serve as a hub for best-in-class research on the great challenges in information science and scholarly communication.

More information about summit details and participants will be available in fall 2017.