Responding to political upheaval with #DefendResearch
For details of the event, please visit:
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/networks/future-of-open-knowledge/#1-programme-2026-2027
About the network
In recent years, scholarly communication has undergone profound transformation. The rapid expansion of open science policies, digital research infrastructures, and AI-assisted knowledge production has created new opportunities for openness and collaboration. At the same time, these developments have raised fundamental questions about trust, governance, and sustainability in the global knowledge ecosystem.
Many of the infrastructures that underpin scholarly communication – publishing platforms, citation databases, metrics systems, and repositories – remain concentrated in a small number of commercial or centralized actors. In response, a growing number of initiatives have begun to explore community-led, open, and scholar-governed alternatives, ranging from open publishing platforms and bibliometric infrastructures to cooperative models of knowledge dissemination.
Our CRASSH Research Network will create an interdisciplinary forum to examine how community-led scholarly infrastructures can contribute to more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy knowledge systems. Bringing together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, information science, and digital humanities, the network will explore both conceptual and practical questions around the governance of open knowledge.
The network will also place particular emphasis on the international dimension of scholarly communication, including perspectives from regions where academic systems face structural challenges, such as Ukraine and other research communities undergoing institutional transformation. This perspective allows us to examine how open infrastructures may contribute not only to innovation in scholarly communication, but also to resilience and international collaboration in times of disruption. Events will also explore how open research systems and infrastructures respond to war, political and societal disruption, institutional transformation, as well as the role of international collaboration and scholarly infrastructures in sustaining knowledge production under challenging conditions.
For details of the network and event, please visit:
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/networks/future-of-open-knowledge/#1-about
For general enquiries or if you have any accessibility needs, please email: networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk