The integrity of the knowledge creation enterprise – and, with it, our future – depends on how effectively we can combat the spread of misinformation and democratize access to trustworthy, verifiable sources of information to stimulate progress in all areas of human activity. Open access to research information is of fundamental importance in this democratization effort, as is the commitment on the part of research and publishing communities to peer review and other methods of promoting the trustworthiness and reproducibility of research outputs. At the same time, we must devise smarter, more fool-proof ways of filtering for truth and discerning the provenance of the information we consume.
The MIT Knowledge Futures Group (KFG) is a new joint initiative of the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab and is supported by generous funding from Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a member of the MIT Media Lab’s Advisory Council. The KFG’s mission is to transform research publishing from a closed, sequential process, into an open, community-driven one, by incubating and deploying open source technologies to support both rapid, open dissemination and a shared ecosystem for information review, provenance, and verification. The partnership is the first of its kind between an established publisher and a world-class academic lab devoted to the design of future-facing technologies.