Events

Join Ithaka S+R for a conversation about how higher education is thinking about AI’s environmental impacts. We will speak with four panelists—Beth Filar Williams (User Experience Research Librarian, Oregon State University Libraries), Chris Rabe (Program Lead, Universal Climate, MIT Open Learning, and Education Program Director, MIT Climate Project), Eira Tansey (founder and manager of Memory Rising), and Sarah Tribelhorn (Sciences and Sustainability Librarian, San Diego State University)—to explore how the environmental impacts of AI could feature within AI…

In this panel discussion at the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference at the Virginia Tech Campus, Chelsea McCracken will present on the Ithaka S+R Sustaining Open Source Software in the Research Enterprise project, with workshop participant John Meluso and Huajin Wang. The session is scheduled to take place on September 28 at 2:30-4:00pm.

For over 36 million Americans, Credit for Prior Learning (or CPL) provides a pathway back to higher education by awarding college credit for learning gained outside the traditional classroom. Could CPL help justice-impacted learners make progress toward a degree?  Ithaka S+R and College Unbound are collaborating on a project to expand access to Credit for Prior Learning for students with lived experiences in carceral settings. On October 8 at 3:00-4:30 PM…

At the American Academy of Arts & Sciences convening, Ithaka S+R’s Chelsea McCracken will lead a session on “What we can know and what we should know about the humanities,” sharing what data tell us about the state of the humanities, and what additional information we need to understand where the field has been, where it is currently, and what the future may hold. The convening is scheduled for October 29-31, 2026.

Higher education keeps treating AI adoption like a complicated technical problem: pick the right tools, write the right policies, train the right people, declare readiness. This session argues it’s actually a complex organizational challenge, one whose effects on trust, role identity, expertise, authority, academic integrity, student agency, and institutional culture can’t be fully predicted in advance, no matter how good the policy. Academic libraries have a strong claim to leadership here. They’ve guided campuses through earlier upheavals, the…

Ithaka S+R’s 2025 survey of US library deans and directors found that support for open access activities has declined in recent years. The share of library leaders who rated having a clear plan to transition spending from subscription to open investments as highly important, for example, declined from 45 percent in 2022 to 23 percent in 2025. Library leaders were also less likely to believe that open access will reduce what their institutions pay for scholarly communication, instead…

Increasingly, scholarly research does not lead to an article or a journal issue. It leads to an answer. That shift creates a practical problem for libraries, publishers, researchers, and infrastructure providers. When an AI tool reads across the scholarly literature and produces a response, the original work may be hard to identify, authorized access may be hard to enforce, and usage may be hard to count. The issue is not whether AI belongs in scholarship, but whether AI-mediated…