Blog
June 17, 2025
Expanding AI Literacy Integration
Fall 2025 Cohort
Building on success, scaling impact Earlier this spring, we kicked off two cohort projects on AI literacy with 45 colleges and universities. In the months since we first announced the cohorts, the urgency of AI literacy integration has only grown. Students increasingly expect their institutions to prepare them not just to use AI tools, but to understand their implications, limitations, and ethical considerations. Faculty are seeking concrete guidance on how to incorporate AI literacy into their courses meaningfully. And…
May 19, 2025
AI Implementation and Governance at Emerging Research Institutions
Announcing a New NSF-Funded Planning Grant
Generative and other AI tools have the potential to transform and accelerate scientific research and communication. However, realizing that potential will require institutions to invest in the administrative and technical infrastructure, staffing, and capacity required to manage the data security, compliance, technical, and ethical issues of generative AI usage at the institutional level, and provide professional development for staff in units engaged in all aspects of the research enterprise. Creating this infrastructure will be difficult for all universities, but is…
April 16, 2025
Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise
Call for Participants
Ithaka S+R and the Apereo Foundation welcome applications to participate in Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise, a workshop made possible by generous funding from the National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Higher education serves as a seedbed for highly successful Open Source Software (OSS). Apache, Linux, R, and Python are all examples of currently widely-used, impactful, and sustained open source projects with roots in higher education. Colleges and universities…
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April 9, 2025
Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula
A New Cohort Project Gets Underway
While the technological and commercial landscape remains fluid, and the long-term impacts of AI on teaching and learning remain contested, colleges and universities are ready to shift from reactive to proactive engagement with AI. AI literacy will be a cornerstone of that engagement at many institutions. The idea that students will need to know how to use and think critically about AI is one on which skeptics, agnostics, and advocates can largely agree. A few universities have already launched AI…
April 1, 2025
Assessing the Humanities
Announcing a New Project to Better Understand the Structure of Humanities Majors and the Perspective of Department Chairs
Ithaka S+R is excited to announce that we have been engaged by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to conduct research on the state of the humanities in higher education. Our research will be part of a portfolio of commissioned work that will contribute to the Academy’s ongoing efforts to gather comprehensive data on systematic challenges facing humanities departments today. Over the coming year, Ithaka S+R will conduct interviews and focus groups with faculty and administrators from across the…
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February 10, 2025
Defining and Implementing AI Literacy
Announcing a New Cohort Project
Defining and implementing AI literacy is complicated by rapidly evolving technologies and the difficulty of foreseeing the magnitude and variety of AI’s effects on teaching and learning, career readiness, and civic life. Creating institutionally specific frameworks for AI literacy and building the programming and resources necessary to integrate it into undergraduate education will require contributions from across the university. Libraries are well positioned to be campus and even national leaders in these efforts.
February 6, 2025
Convening Stakeholders in the Open-Source Ecosystem Workshop
Announcing a New NSF-Funded Project
Open Source Software (OSS) has great potential to benefit higher education and is increasingly recognized as a core component of open science. The community that supports OSS for teaching and administrative purposes, such as Moodle and MIT Mathlets, has made great progress in seeding, scaling, and sustaining their projects within the academy and has built a robust and sustainable infrastructure. However, academic silos have made it difficult for this community to share knowledge with those developing OSS for research purposes.
October 30, 2024
What Does Generative AI Mean for Scholarly Publishing?
Over the past 24 months, generative AI has become inescapable. As a tool that is capable of generating content, its implications for how scholarly research is conducted and for scholarly publishing and communication are potentially transformative. What is not yet clear is how transformative this impact will be, and which areas of scholarly communication may see more rapid and revolutionary change than others. In a report published today, with funding from STM Solutions and six of its member organizations, we…
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June 20, 2024
How Are Faculty Using Generative AI in the Classroom?
Findings from a National Survey
Since the commercial release of ChatGPT in 2022, generative AI has had an undeniable impact on higher education, reshaping student learning methods, prompting concerns regarding academic integrity, and sparking larger questions on teaching and learning. It is therefore vital to understand how instructors are currently using (or not using) generative AI in their classrooms to support teaching. To gain insight into how instructional practices are evolving, Ithaka S+R fielded the triennial survey of postsecondary faculty with a focus on…
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April 23, 2024
Generative AI and Scholarly Publishing
Announcing a New Research Project
Over the past several years, Ithaka S+R has conducted several major studies on the scholarly publishing landscape during a time of rapid technological change. There is no better example of how rapid and radical this pace is than generative AI tools, which have moved from the margins to a focal point of scholarly publishing in little more than one year. Last spring, we conducted interviews with publishers, librarians, advocates, analysts, funders, and policymakers as the horizons of possibility and risk…
March 14, 2024
Mapping Research Data Support Services
A New Report from Ithaka S+R Shares Findings from an International Inventory
The complexity of contemporary research practices have created significant demand for a wide range of support services within university research communities. Libraries and other campus units have responded by developing an array of research data support services to help researchers learn new tools, improve their skill sets, and manage their data across the research lifecycle. Because these services often evolved without central oversight or cross-unit coordination, it can be difficult for users to understand exactly what is available to them…
March 7, 2024
Keeping Up with the Educational Market for Generative AI Tools
Announcing Ithaka S+R’s Product Tracking Tool
Ithaka S+R has been closely tracking the generative AI product landscape through a unique Product Tracking Tool. The Product Tracker includes descriptions of tools marketed towards postsecondary faculty or student users, as well as information about the pricing model, key features, and other relevant detail.
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February 8, 2024
Biomedical Research and Generative AI
Announcing an International Survey
AI has driven important advances in biomedical research for some time, spurring drug discovery, improving medical imaging, and facilitating engagements with large datasets in emerging fields like precision medicine. However, recent advances, notably the advent of consumer-friendly generative AI tools, have increased the likelihood that AI-informed research and scholarly communication will be ubiquitous in the near future. Managing this transformation in ways that ensure high-quality, reproducible results and ethical, inclusive research practices is important across academic disciplines, but identifying current…
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September 21, 2023
Generative AI Goes Back to School
Where Things Stand in Fall 2023
The commercial release of ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI created a firestorm this spring in and well beyond higher education. Other types of AI were already being used in university settings, particularly by researchers, but the sudden availability of consumer-friendly tools capable of generating responses to virtually any query transformed AI from a specialized tool into a mass-market product. The rapid spread of these easy to use tools raised important questions about teaching, learning, and research practices in…
August 28, 2023
Archives in the Anthropocene
An Interview with Eira Tansey
Cultural organizations and the government agencies that support them are increasingly devoting serious attention and financial resources to reducing their carbon footprints and climate-proofing their facilities. In a new addition to the growing body of literature on the topic, archivist and founder of the consulting firm Memory Rising, Eira Tansey outlines an ambitious policy agenda for mitigating the threats that climate change poses to archival collections and archivists. The agenda she proposes in A Green New Deal for…
August 15, 2023
The Future of Annual Meetings and Scholarly Societies
New Report from Ithaka S+R and JSTOR Labs
As the pandemic recedes into memory, scholarly societies find themselves at a crossroads. For the past several years, the decision to hold hybrid or virtual meetings was dictated by outside forces: it is now a matter of choice. Though the virtual meetings of 2020-22 mostly failed to provide the rich social and networking experiences that in-conference meetings provide, they were more accessible to a much wider, and more diverse, community of scholars.
August 1, 2023
Assessing Open Source Program Offices’ Role in the Academic Research Enterprise
Open source software is the backbone of the digital economy and is critical to the development and maintenance of transparent, inclusive, and secure digital infrastructures. Universities and their employees rely on it daily for everything from basic communication to advanced research, and in turn make substantial contributions to the open source resources used within and beyond higher education. Over the past several decades, major corporations have created centralized offices, often known as Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), to coordinate and…
June 1, 2023
Coordinating Research Data Services
Key Barriers and Questions
This spring, 107 librarians, administrators, and staff from the 29 universities participating in Ithaka S+R’s Building Campus Strategies for Coordinated Data Support project began to identify barriers to streamlining their research data support services. The project’s first two meetings brought together representatives from university units involved in supporting academic researchers: librarians, senior administrators, research officers, and research computing staff. Working primarily in small groups roughly divided by professional capacity, participants described the ways that different university units—and different institutional…
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May 24, 2023
Making AI Generative for Higher Education
Announcing the Partners for a New Multi-Year Research Project
The ability of computers to create content is advancing rapidly, spurring an investment arms race within the technology sector. As new products like ChatGPT and Midjourney turn AI into a part of daily life, universities are facing decisions about how students, instructors, and researchers can best engage with these new tools. This fall, as part of a two-year research project, Ithaka S+R is convening a select group of universities committed to making AI generative for their campus community. Today we…
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March 14, 2023
Making AI Generative for Higher Education
The ability of computers to create original content is advancing rapidly, spurring an investment arms race within the technology sector. As these advancements touch every area of higher education, universities face decisions about how and when AI can support student learning and faculty research. This fall, Ithaka S+R is convening a two-year research project in collaboration with a select group of universities committed to making AI generative for their campus community. Together we will assess the immediate and emerging AI…
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