RESOURCE: A Grand-Challenges Based Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication and Information Science

MIT hosted a Grand Challenges Summit in March 2018, and participants from that summit have released a white paper, “A Grand-Challenges Based Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication and Information Science.”

From the introduction:

A global and multidisciplinary community of stakeholders came together in March 2018 to identify, scope, and prioritize a common vision for specific grand research challenges related to information science and scholarly communications. The participants were both traditional domain researchers and those who are aiming to democratize scholarship. An explicit aim of the summit was to identify research needs related to barriers in the development of scalable, interoperating, socially beneficial, and equitable systems for scholarly information; and to explore the development of non-market approaches to governing the scholarly ecosystem.

To spur discussion and exploration, grand challenge provocations were suggested by participants and framed into one of three sections: scholarly discovery; digital curation and preservation; and open scholarship… During our discussions it quickly became clear that the grand challenges themselves cannot be neatly categorized into discovery, curation and preservation, and open scholarship, or even for that matter limited to information science or librarianship. Several cross-cutting themes emerged, such as a strong desire to include underrepresented voices and communities outside of mainstream publishing and academic institutions, a need to identify incentives that will motivate people to make changes in their own approaches and processes toward a more open and trusted framework, and a need to identify collaborators and partners from multiple disciplines in order to build strong programs should be at the center of future planning.

The white paper is open for contributions and comments.