Topic: Research practices
Blog Post
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…
Blog Post
March 27, 2025
What Challenges Do Academic Researchers Experience and How Do Campus Data Service Providers Assist Them?
New Report Shares Findings from a Qualitative Study of Researchers at 29 Higher Ed Institutions
In recent years, as funders have increased their expectations for data sharing and machine learning use cases have multiplied, the need to develop an efficient infrastructure of research support services has become a strategic priority for many colleges and universities. To inform university decision making, Ithaka S+R has collaborated over the past two years with 29 US and Canadian institutions to develop strategies for improving the coordination of research data support services offered across different campus offices.
Research Report
March 27, 2025
Researcher Challenges and Experiences with Data Services
While there is general consensus that institutions should provide a coordinated research data services support infrastructure to their researchers, determining the most effective way to do this has proven more difficult, especially in light of the fast-paced technological changes that have precipitated new forms of research collaborations, methodologies, and discoveries. In this report, we share findings from interviews with researchers that provide information about their data management needs and their current level of engagement with campus data services.
Research Report
March 19, 2025
Meeting the Climate Emergency
University Information Infrastructure for Researching Wicked Problems
Contemporary societies face a range of urgent threats to the well-being of individuals, nations, and the natural world. These high stakes “wicked problems,” as Don Waters calls them in this report, present challenges that are simultaneously scientific, technological, social, and creative. They require expertise from across the disciplines to understand, and equally complex public and political engagement, to overcome. Waters makes the case that America’s research universities are exceptionally well-equipped to address these wicked problems.
Blog Post
March 11, 2025
Centralizing Data Services from the Bottom Up
Challenges in navigating the research enterprise Coordinating any type of service or offering across offices and departments is a persistent and pervasive problem at large universities, and research data support services are no exception. As Ruby MacDougall noted in the announcement of Ithaka S+R’s Building Campus Strategies for Data Support Services project, “data support services tend to exist in silos, which can create economic inefficiencies, duplication of services, and programming gaps.” These challenges motivated a multi-unit team from The…
Blog Post
March 10, 2025
University Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in Action
Announcing an Ithaka S+R Webinar
For over two decades, Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) have played an important role in the private sector, serving as centralized hubs for managing open source engagement and strategy. Facilitating the development, contribution, and governance of widely used tools and critical digital infrastructure, the value of OSPOs is well established in corporate contexts. In higher education, however, OSPOs have only recently begun to gain traction. Universities and their employees rely extensively on open source software for…
Past Event
March 13, 2025
Understanding Researcher Needs and Challenges
Findings from a Qualitative Study on Research Data Services
In the past few decades, partnerships between libraries and other campus units have become important contributors to sustaining the growth of the research enterprise at higher-education institutions across the globe. Providing cross-campus research support services, these partnerships are essential for helping researchers navigate the increasingly complex world of research data management and for developing connective infrastructure to effectively support researchers. To better understand effective strategies for research data services delivery at North American research universities, Ithaka S+R, in collaboration with…
Past Event
February 20, 2025
Generative AI in Higher Education
Emerging Impacts on Research & Teaching
On Thursday, February 20, Ithaka S+R’s Dylan Ruediger will participate in a virtual panel discussion hosted by the University of Delaware that will be focused on generative AI in higher education and emerging impacts on research and teaching.
Blog Post
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.
Blog Post
January 15, 2025
Reflections on Creating a Cross-Campus Collaboration for Reproducibility
Challenges in reproducible research The ability to reproduce results is a cornerstone of scientific integrity in academic research. Reproducibility in research ensures that results can be independently verified, thereby enhancing the credibility and reliability of findings. However, achieving reproducibility is not without its challenges. Researchers often grapple with organizing their analyses, learning new computational tools, and diligently documenting their data and methodologies. These were some of the challenges raised during interviews with faculty at the University of Victoria (UVic) conducted…
Past Event
February 11, 2025
Charting the Way Upward
Preliminary Findings in AI Services and Adoption in Higher Education
In the Summer of 2023, Ithaka S+R launched a research and consulting project, “Making AI Generative for Higher Education” that assists 18 higher education institutions in identifying ways and areas generative AI (GAI) is poised to revolutionize educational practices, yet these areas are not receiving sufficient attention from our institution or the higher education sector at large. This panel discussion, part of NISO Plus Baltimore 2025, aims to explore the preliminary findings of our ongoing project, which investigates…
Past Event
November 15, 2024
Innovation and Shared Infrastructure in Artificial Intelligence Applications
At the 2024 CONCERT Conference, Roger Schonfeld will give a keynote speech on innovation and shared infrastructure in GenAI applications, sharing insights from Ithaka S+R research. The session will take place on November 15 at 9:30-10:30am. Visit the website to learn more.
Past Event
November 19, 2024
AI and The University Mission
Teaching, Learning, and Research
Ithaka S+R’s Dylan Ruediger will speak at the Notre Dame AI Forum in a session focusing on “AI and The University Mission: Teaching, Learning, and Research.” The session will take place on November 19 at 3:15pm – 4:00pm. Learn more and see the full conference schedule.
Research Report
October 30, 2024
A Third Transformation?
Generative AI and Scholarly Publishing
For this report, we interviewed leaders in stakeholder communities about the potential impact of generative AI on scholarly publishing . The consensus among the individuals with whom we spoke is that generative AI will enable efficiency gains across the publication process. Writing, reviewing, editing, and discovery will all become easier and faster. Both scholarly publishing and scientific discovery in turn will likely accelerate. From that shared premise, two distinct categories of change emerged from our interviews.
Blog Post
October 17, 2024
How is Generative AI Being Used in Biomedical Research?
A New Report Shares Findings from a Survey of Academic Researchers
When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, it prompted an ongoing national conversation about the role of generative AI across all sectors of intellectual labor. Within the academy, that conversation has focused primarily on generative AI’s impact on instruction, with relatively little attention being given to its role in scholarly research. The field of biomedical research in particular has provided some of the most promising use cases for generative AI, as well as being a site for potentially significant harm…
Research Report
October 17, 2024
Adoption of Generative AI by Academic Biomedical Researchers
Understanding how biomedical researchers are making use of generative AI is critical to informed decision making about how to support ethical adoption of the technology and assessing the risks and opportunities it presents to the research enterprise. However, most studies of the use of generative AI by academic researchers have cast a wide net rather than focusing on adoption in specific disciplines or domains. To this end, we conducted a survey of biomedical researchers.
Past Event
October 29, 2024
The Early Impacts of Generative AI on Biomedical Research
Findings from an International Survey
Join us for an in-depth discussion on the use of generative AI to advance biomedical research. We’ll share key findings from an international survey of biomedical researchers commissioned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and conducted by Ithaka S+R, including detailed information about the specific tasks that biomedical researchers are performing with generative AI, and how often they are doing so. We’ll also consider where the field may be heading and observations about how to maximize the value of this exciting…
Past Event
March 20, 2025
AI and Science: The Big Picture
We are just at the beginning of the artificial intelligence revolution. How will AI change the practice of science? What will this mean for how research is communicated? At the 2025 National Academy of Sciences Journal Summit on March 20 at 9am-10:15am ET, Ithaka S+R’s Roger Schonfeld will join Columbia University Executive Vice President for Research Jeannette Wing in a discussion of the current state and future of AI and science.
Blog Post
September 11, 2024
From Drawing to Doing
The Implementation of Cross-Campus Research Data Services Solutions
In February 2023, Ithaka S+R launched Building Campus Strategies for Coordinated Data Support, a project designed to help universities create viable strategies for delivering and sustaining research data service across campus. Following workshops to conceptualize new approaches or solutions to service delivery, cohort teams revisited some of the design thinking activities on their own campuses and honed in on a tangible idea or solution to implement.
Past Event
August 21, 2024
Navigating Teaching and Research in the Age of Generative AI
Highlights from Ithaka S+R’s Product Tracker and Instructor Survey
Ithaka S+R’s Claire Baytas will present on “Navigating Teaching and Research in the Age of Generative AI” at the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Community of Interest group on AI in Scholarly Publishing. The session will share highlights from Ithaka S+R’s GenAI Product Tracker and insights from the 2024 national survey of college instructors and their usage of generative AI.